Alexandre Tharaud’s 2001 disc of Rameau keyboard works (5/02) was a refreshing demonstration that French harpsichord music can be convincingly transferred to the piano, twiddles and all, if its essential character is respected and understood. Now he attempts the seemingly tougher task of doing the same for the more delicate Couperin, and again emerges with honour. Reactions to a disc like this can only be personal, but mine are that, compared to the more “correct” but less colourful Angela Hewitt (Hyperion, 5/03, 5/04), Tharaud’s unapologetically pianistic approach not only yields highly attractive results but also gets closer to Couperin’s true spirit.

Mind you, he only chooses works that he considers suitable to the piano, selecting from right across Couperin’s output rather than playing whole suites. I would say he gets it wrong only twice, in La visionnaire and the great B minor Passacaille, fulsome formal pieces both, whose grandeur the piano somehow manages to dull. Yet for the most part the music sounds beautifully at home. Poetic wonders such as La muse plantine, Les ombres errantes and the iconic Les baricades mistérieuses are played with tender sensitivity of mind and touch, while Le carillon de Cithére is a glistening vision of a Watteauesque paradise. Elsewhere, Le tic-toc-choc and Les tours de passe-passe are enlivened by off-beat accents, Bruit de guerre thrills with its added drum part, and Muséte de taverni, multi-tracked into a work à 5 mains, rattles away like some delicious missing movement from L’arlésienne. Tharaud closes with a piece by Duphly, relishing its dark melancholy and, not for the first time on this disc, evoking another great keyboard poet, Robert Schumann. For me though, this is a release which successfully recognises and celebrates Couperin’s genius, and you cannot ask for much more than that.