The artistically satisfying collaboration of Robert King and James Bowman with Hyperion is a familiar one to CD collectors of the virtuoso airs and arias of Purcell and Handel, not to say Blow and even J. S. Bach. On at least two of these discs they have been joined by Michael Chance. Bowman and Chance are acknowledged among the finest countertenors of our day and, in particular, masters of the English style.
The French style in itself presents formidable challenges to all but the specialist. In certain genres, especially the piece de clavecin, Couperin is the supreme exponent of the mature French baroque style, but in the case of his sacred vocal works there are other factors to consider. The Latin texts could be assumed to present few problems to experienced choral singers, but what about the effect of French pronunciation and even the meters and gestures of French rhetoric which would have influenced Couperin's setting? Add to them Couperin's preoccupation with the Italian style, particularly during the 1690s when he composed the two motets and the Magnificat, and singers concerned with 'style' might be forgiven for feeling befuddled and inclined to dismiss such pretence altogether.
But should they? For this is what Bowman and Chance have done: they sing beautifully and reverently in a generalized baroque manner with few concessions to anything that might be defined as 'the French style'. Many of their following who will rightly delight in yet another fine example of the precision of their duetting, the clarity of their articulation, the exquisiteness of their intonation and the delicacy of their endings (especially in the Venite exultemus Domino and the Troisieme lecon de tenebre), giving relatively little consideration to whether the music sounds like Couperin's or indeed French music at all.
Of course, no one expects or at any rate demands performers of these works to sing the Latin text with a French accent, nor would one wish the imitative passages to sound like a Corellian violin duet. But I miss the sense of the music's provenance and individuality. From the beginning of the Laetentur coeli, there is a kind of English four-squareness about the performance which is alien to French music and certainly to music associated with the Hebrew language (I refer the listener to their consciously rhythmic interpretation of Couperin's melismas on the Hebrew letters which initiate sections of the Troisieme lecon). When they do 'bend the rhythms' it is often clumsy, in large part because they do not play upon the harmonic tensions of the suspensions, choosing to begin strongly on consonances and diminuendo into the dissonance, instead of vice versa. The concept of enfle or swelling on the dissonance, described so well by Couperin's contemporary Michel Pignolet de Monteclair in his monumental vocal treatise, Principes de Musique, and also much practised by fellow French string and wind players, is a fundamental feature of the French style.
Equally disappointing, however, are the liberties taken with Couperin's carefully written-out ornamentation. Much of it Bowman and Chance simply choose not to perform, elsewhere they trivialize the trills, which might otherwise have provided good effect. Perhaps they didn't have access to the excellent L'Oiseau-Lyre edition of these works produced by the harpsichordists-editors extraordinaires Kenneth Gilbert and Davitt Moroney in 1985.'