Thursday 18 June 2009

I'm still dividing my time between practising and organising. I've been re-visiting the François Couperin Passacaille in B minor, a piece I first played as a student, and what's really striking is that if you follow his instructions on how to sit at the harpsichord, it leads you to play it in a certain way; or rather, it makes certain other ways of playing it impossible. In his L'art de Toucher le Claveçin, he asks that the player turns his body a little to the right: this is so that he can 'look at the company in which he finds himself' if not playing from a book. And you must have an air of ease - if you find yourself making faces while you play, you can put a mirror on the music desk to remedy that. All of this stops you from assuming 'tortured artist' poses like Romantic virtuosi, or even like Couperin's contemporary Italian violinists. It also stops you from investing the music with the wrong kind of meaning: it's tempting to play the Passacaille as a vast architectural exercise in tension and its release (and, coincidentally, crowd-pleasing), but in fact it's a lot more subtle than that.