LDV147.8

27 ANDRÉ ISOIR Born around 1650, Gilles Jullien may have been a pupil of Gigault. At the age of eighteen he became organist of Chartres Cathedral, retaining this post until his death in 1703. His style is close to the vocal recitative of Lully, redolent of the authentic pomp of the age of Louis XIV. Jean-Henry d’Anglebert (1629-1691) was one of the great masters of the first French harpsichord school. His Quatuor sur le Kyrie à trois sujets tirés du plain-chant is a twenty-three-bar contrapuntal exercise in the manner of a ricercare. Louis Couperin (1626-1661) may be seen as the missing link between Titelouze and the great flowering of organ music in the Grand Siècle. His quivering subjectivity finds expression in tones that are intensely personal and often extremely audacious. A profound melancholy, no doubt caused by the precarious situation of music, characterises the aesthetic positions of French art during the fascinating, crepuscular era of Louis XIII. Louis Couperin’s language often shows unsettling affinities with that of the much younger Purcell. Jehan Titelouze (1563-1633) is the true father of the French organ school. Before him, France left only anonymous pieces for posterity, and from the whole vast century that stretches between Attaingnant’s printed anthology and Titelouze, so rich in organ literature in other countries of Europe, we possess virtually nothing. The Hymns, in the complexity of their polyphony, the austerity of their language and the loftiness of a conception shorn of sensual appeal, demand boundless melodic and rhythmic imagination of the performer.