Les Graces Incomparables
Béatrice Martin, harpsichord
Filmed July 2023 on the Ruckers-Taskin harpsichord, Musée de la musique, Philharmonie de Paris–Cité de la musique, Paris, France
A Tribute to Anne, the Princess Royal and Handel’s favorite pupil
From Les Pièces de Clavecin de Mademoiselle de La Guerre, 1687 Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre Suite in A minor (1665–1729)
Prélude Chaconne
Erik Bosgraaf, recorder
Francesco Corti, harpsichord
From Troisième Livre de Pièces de Clavecin, Seizième Ordre, 1722 François Couperin
Les Graces incomparables ou La Conti, Majestueusement (1668–1733)
Sonata in C major
George Frideric Handel for Recorder and Basso Continuo, HWV 365 (1685–1759)
From Quatrième Livre de Pièces de Clavecin, Vingt-et-unième Ordre, 1730
La Reine des Cœurs, Lentement, et très tendrement
From Second Livre de Pièces de Clavecin, Douzième Ordre, 1716
Larghetto — Allegro — Larghetto — A tempo di Gavotta — Allegro
L’Atalante, très légèrement
Count Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer for Recorder and Basso Continuo (1692–1766)
Sonata terza in G minor
Sonata in G major, K.144, Cantabile
Grave — Allegro — Sarabanda. Grave — Giga presto
Domenico Scarlatti
Sonata in C minor, K.99, Allegro (1685–1757)
Suite in D minor for Harpsichord, HWV 428 Handel
From Troisième Livre de Pièces de Clavecin, 1756
Prelude — Allegro — Allemande — Courante — Air & Double — Presto
Jacques Duphly
La Forqueray, Rondeau (1715–1789)
Sonata in G major, Op. 9, No. 7 Jean-Marie Leclair (l’aîné) for [Voice] Flute and Basso Continuo (1697–1764)
Chaconne
Médée, Vivement et fort
Andante — Allegro ma non tanto —
From Troisième Livre de Pièces de Clavecin, Seizième Ordre, 1722
Aria. Affettuoso; Altro — Giga. Allegro moderato
La Distraite, Tendrement, et très lié
François Couperin
Sonata seconda in G minor Van Wassenaer for Recorder and Basso Continuo
La Dauphine, 1747
Grave — Allegro — Adagio — Giga presto
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764)
Sonata in B minor Handel for Voice Flute and Basso Continuo, HWV 367a
Sonata da Cimbalo in G major, 1769
Marianna Martines Allegro brillante (1744–1812)
Largo — Vivace — Furioso — Adagio — Alla breve — Andante — A tempo di menuet
Andante
Allegro assai
Sonata in E major, Op. 30, No. 7 Johann Christian Schickhardt for Recorder and Basso Continuo (ca. 1681–1762)
Allegro — Siciliano — Allegro — Allegro — Giga — Allegro
W Double-manual harpsichord by Andreas II Ruckers, Antwerp, Belgium, 1646, X renovated by Pascal Taskin, Paris, France, 1780, from the collection of the Musée de la musique, Paris, France.
Lucas Joseph, Recording Engineer
Laurent Sarazin, Director
Clément Gaultier & David Cabannes, Cinematographer
Laurent Sarazin, Editing
Patrick Yègre, Harpsichord tuner
Mélodie Ras, Make-up and hair artist
Special thanks to:
Marie-Pauline Martin
Emmanuelle Audouard
Christine Laloue
Boston Early Music Festival Vocal Ensemble
Notes on the Program
Jean-Claude Battault
Cité de la musique–Philharmonie de Paris
Mireille Lebel, Alcina
Colin Balzer, Ruggiero
Cecilia Duarte, Melissa
Hannah De Priest, Nola Richardson, Megan Stapleton, Teresa Wakim, soprano
Mindy Ella Chu, Kameryn Lueng, mezzo-soprano
David Evans, Brian Giebler, Kyle Stegall, tenor
Les Graces Incomparables (The Incomparable Graces), a recital dedicated to female figures of the Baroque Era, presents a whole cast of women in a variety of different roles, whose pride and courage are as important as their delicacy and refinement.
Michael Galvin, Douglas Williams, bass-baritone
Daniel Fridley, bass
Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble
Since our first praises must be sung to the creators themselves, female composers in an age when it was extremely rare for this gift to be acknowledged in a woman outside her family circle, the right figure to open the program is obviously Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, music’s uncontested leading lady under Louis XIV. Girl wonder of the Jacquet family, where girls and boys alike were all musicians, she was presented to the great Sun King at the age of five, and was only ten when the Mercure de France had this to say about the admiration she inspired: “She sings the most difficult music at sight. She accompanies herself and others who want to sing from the harpsichord, which she plays incomparably well. She composes pieces and plays them in any key you ask her for.” She was kept busy at Court composing divertissements for a while before she married organist Marin de La Guerre in 1684 and returned to Paris, where she worked hard as a professional musician, building up a teaching practice and even managing to have an opera put on at the Académie Royale in 1694, a remarkable achievement even if her tragédie lyrique, Cephale et Procris, wasn’t the success she hoped it would be. She earned sufficient admiration and respect for her works to be published, and her several volumes of Pièces de clavecin in particular allow us to appreciate the nobility and depth of her writing.
Robert Mealy, concertmaster
Julie Andrijeski, violin
Sarah Darling, violin & viola
David Morris, lirone & viola da gamba
Christel Thielmann, viola da gamba & recorder
Laura Jeppesen, viola da gamba
Kathryn Montoya, recorder
Héloïse Degrugillier, recorder
Maxine Eilander, Baroque harp
Michael Sponseller, harpsichord, organ & regal
Paul O’Dette, lute & Baroque guitar
Stephen Stubbs, chitarrone & Baroque guitar
W Double-manual German harpsichord by Allan Winkler, Medford, Massachusetts, 1989, X after Fleischer, property of the Boston Early Music Festival.
W Michael von Clemm Continuo Organ by Henk Klop, 2006, X courtesy of the Memorial Church, Harvard University. (Boston performance only.)
The program closes with another woman composer, one who is less well-known but whose artistic destiny was dictated by the series of encounters which marked her fascinatingly glamorous life in Vienna. Marianna Martines was the daughter of a Spanish gentleman whose family lived in the same building as the poet and prodigious opera seria librettist Pietro Metastasio. The latter took an interest in the education of the Martines children and, spotting young Marianna’s talent, arranged for her to take singing lessons with the great Porpora and harpsichord lessons with Joseph Haydn, who, since losing his post as a soprano at the cathedral choir when his voice broke at seventeen, had been living in the attic of the same building! She also took composition lessons with none other than the illustrious Johann Adolf Hasse! She had all the attributes of a professional musician, singing and playing the harpsichord, directing a wide variety of instrumental and vocal programs both sacred and secular. Unlike Jacquet de La Guerre, however, she was not paid for her work: noblesse oblige precluded remuneration, however modest the rank of the noblewoman in question. Her musical output coincided with the passage from the very end of the Baroque Era toward Classicism and thus from the reign of the harpsichord toward that of the pianoforte. Her early Sonatas, including the one in this program, were “di cembalo,” and she then turned rapidly to writing for the pianoforte. Mozart, with whom she was also acquainted, is supposed to have written his concerto K. 175 for her.
W Italian “Nuovolone” triple harp (after the painting La familia del artista Brera) X by Claus Henry Hüttel, Düren, 2023, property of the Boston Early Music Festival.
W Continuo organ by the Klop Workshop, The Netherlands, 2003, X provided by Baroque Keyboards. (Mahaiwe and Caramoor performances only.)
W Regal by Meloni & Farrier Organbuilders, New York, 2017. X (Mahaiwe and Caramoor performances only.)
Other eminent women are celebrated in this program, not through their own works but for the role they played in the lives and works of contemporary composers. Given the social structure of the times, these women were often princesses or sovereigns.
One such figure is the Princess of Conti. The fruit of Louis XIV’s liaison with Louise de La Vallière, Marie-Anne de Bourbon was born in 1666 and legitimized a year later. One of the King’s favorite children, she was given a particularly thorough education, especially in music. In 1680 she married the Prince of Conti, and had already been a widow for ten years when the young François Couperin was made musicien ordinaire du Roi in 1695. This post, in addition to his work for the Chapel Royal, brought Couperin into close contact with the royal family. He was roughly the same age as the Princess, whose reputation as a beauty is attested to by contemporary paintings. To her he dedicated the piece from which this program takes its name, Les Graces incomparables: homage to be proud of! The piece is marked “majestically,” but this is a majesty which smacks more of charm than of stiff ceremony.
Other feminine images in this program are not so much specific portraits as “genre portraits” or psychological sketches such as one often finds juxtaposed with the usual dances—allemandes, sarabandes, and gigues—in harpsichord suites.
A Tribute to Anne, the Princess Royal and Handel’s favorite pupil
Erik Bosgraaf, recorder
Francesco Corti, harpsichord
Couperin’s La Reine des Cœurs (The Queen of Hearts) is as irresistible as its title, marked “very tenderly” and written in an E minor which mingles charm with melancholy and does indeed “tug at every heartstring.” “Tenderly” is also the marking for his La Distraite, and we find ourselves poles apart both from the “absentmindedness” of La Bruyère’s Ménalque (Les Caractères) and from the capricious feeling of the famous movement of Telemann’s well-named quartet Le Distrait. Our “distraction” here is more that of a beauty wrapped up in her own thoughts, a beautiful dreamer—and indeed the title La Rêveuse had already been used by Marin Marais. Once again François Couperin’s writing inspires us wonderfully with the idea of grace.
Sonata in C major George Frideric Handel for Recorder and Basso Continuo, HWV 365 (1685–1759)
Larghetto — Allegro — Larghetto — A tempo di Gavotta — Allegro
Our final collection of female figures comes from the great heroines of mythology, who played such an important part in Baroque music, along with a couple of sorceresses from courtly romances, furnishing the plot of countless operas, of course, but also a large number of secular cantatas.
Sonata terza in G minor Count Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer for Recorder and Basso Continuo (1692–1766)
Grave — Allegro — Sarabanda. Grave — Giga presto
Suite in D minor for Harpsichord, HWV 428 Handel
Prelude — Allegro — Allemande — Courante — Air & Double — Presto
Sonata in G major, Op. 9, No. 7 Jean-Marie Leclair (l’aîné) for [Voice] Flute and Basso Continuo (1697–1764)
Andante — Allegro ma non tanto —
Aria. Affettuoso; Altro — Giga. Allegro moderato
It is for a similar relationship, albeit more remarkable for its long duration and exclusive nature, that Domenico Scarlatti is included in this musical journey. The Neapolitan composer arrived in Lisbon at the age of thirty-five to teach the harpsichord to Princess MariaBarbara of Braganza, the King of Portugal’s daughter. He remained at her side when she married Ferdinand, heir to the Spanish throne, in 1729, and then became queen in 1746, scarcely ever leaving Spain. They died within a year of one another. This extraordinary relationship between a teacher and his immensely talented pupil and patron was to produce a unique corpus of 555 sonatas. The first were actually called essercizi, all are in two AABB sections, and they are designed to encourage both the player’s technical virtuosity and the expressive capacity of the instrument itself. The two included in this program illustrate these two aspects to perfection: on the one hand, in K.144, a highly decorated cantabile full of chromatic surprises; and on the other, in K.99, a fairly acrobatic piece full of leaps, crossed hands, batterie, and accents in the style of popular Andalusian music.
Sonata seconda in G minor Van Wassenaer for Recorder and Basso Continuo
With L’Atalante, the brilliant finale of his Deuxième livre, Couperin abandons the infinite graces which we know he could evoke for an almost uninterrupted sixteenth-note steeplechase, evoking the energy of Atalanta, as beautiful as she was exceptionally physically powerful, to call masculine supremacy into question, whether in hunting, wrestling, or racing. Atalanta refused to marry unless a man beat her in a footrace, a feat which Hippomène achieved by tempting her with the golden apples. That was undoubtedly the episode of Atalanta’s life which inspired this piece.
Grave — Allegro — Adagio — Giga presto
Jean-Philippe Rameau’s La Dauphine refers to another royal princess, although without any specific musical allusion. In 1747, Marie-Josèphe de Saxe became Dauphine de France when she married Louis, the recently widowed eldest son of Louis XV (both were to die of tuberculosis twenty years later before Louis could ascend to the throne). This was the occasion for Rameau, then at the height of his powers as an opera composer, to return to the composition for harpsichord which had made him famous in the 1720s and 1730s. This piece was to be one of a kind: bursting with energy, it sounds almost improvised, but in it we can discern the orchestral compositional techniques Rameau had acquired since that time as well as his characteristically unexpected modulations.
Sonata in B minor Handel for Voice Flute and Basso Continuo, HWV 367a
Largo — Vivace — Furioso — Adagio — Alla breve — Andante — A tempo di menuet
Sonata in E major, Op. 30, No. 7 Johann Christian Schickhardt for Recorder and Basso Continuo (ca. 1681–1762)
Even more spectacular is the energy of Jacques Duphly’s Médée, presented here with the two pieces preceding it in the Troisième livre in the same key of F. All the power of the sorceress-princess of Colchis can be heard here, her wounded pride and vengeful fury at Jason’s treachery trampling everything in its path, requiring all the mechanical resources of the instrument as well as the virtuosity of the performer to produce a huge sound in this headlong race to destruction.
Allegro — Siciliano — Allegro — Allegro — Giga — Allegro
Looking beyond questions of genre, however, we cannot but be fascinated by the extraordinary emotional range the harpsichord deploys in these pieces.
In his Art de toucher le clavecin (The Art of playing the harpsichord), François Couperin expresses himself beautifully: “Each of the sounds of the harpsichord is fixed; and cannot therefore be made louder or softer: it has hitherto been impossible to claim that this instrument has a soul.”
Artist Prof ile
Contrasted and intensely moving characters, extreme and intense emotions…the harpsichord bares its soul in this program to show us the astonishing range of its expressive capacity. h
—Laurent Collobert and Béatrice MartinTranslation: Sophie Decaudaveine
Boston Early Music Festival Vocal Ensemble
Mireille Lebel, Alcina
Colin Balzer, Ruggiero
Cecilia Duarte, Melissa
Hannah De Priest, Nola Richardson, Megan Stapleton, Teresa Wakim, soprano
Mindy Ella Chu, Kameryn Lueng, mezzo-soprano
David Evans, Brian Giebler, Kyle Stegall, tenor
Michael Galvin, Douglas Williams, bass-baritone
Daniel Fridley, bass
Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble
Robert Mealy, concertmaster
Julie Andrijeski, violin
Sarah Darling, violin & viola
lirone & viola da gamba
viola da gamba & recorder
First Prize recipient in the 1998 Bruges International Harpsichord Competition, Béatrice Martin leads a brilliant career as a concert artist, chamber player, and pedagogue. As a much sought-out soloist, she has played in many countries and festivals (United States, Brazil, Mexico, Hungary, United Kingdom, Italy, etc.), delighting in the vast repertory of her instrument—from early virginalists to the sons of Bach—exploring the French, Italian, and German styles. A privileged partner of William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, she is also a founding member of Les Folies Françoises, an ensemble directed by Patrick Cohën-Akenine which has given over 900 concerts. An impassioned and accomplished instructor, in 2014 she joined the faculty of The Juilliard School, teaching as well at the Haute École de Musique de Geneva and the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris. Critics praise her “dream touch” and “the elegance, voluptuousness and grandeur of her playing.” h
Laura Jeppesen, viola da gamba
Kathryn Montoya, recorder
Héloïse Degrugillier, recorder
Maxine Eilander, Baroque harp
Michael Sponseller, harpsichord, organ & regal
Paul O’Dette, lute & Baroque guitar
Stephen Stubbs, chitarrone & Baroque guitar
W Double-manual German harpsichord by Allan Winkler, Medford, Massachusetts, 1989, X after Fleischer, property of the Boston Early Music Festival.
W Michael von Clemm Continuo Organ by Henk Klop, 2006, X courtesy of the Memorial Church, Harvard University. (Boston performance only.)
W Italian “Nuovolone” triple harp (after the painting La familia del artista Brera) X by Claus Henry Hüttel, Düren, 2023, property of the Boston Early Music Festival.
W Continuo organ by the Klop Workshop, The Netherlands, 2003, X provided by Baroque Keyboards. (Mahaiwe and Caramoor performances only.)
W Regal by Meloni & Farrier Organbuilders, New York, 2017. X (Mahaiwe and Caramoor performances only.)