A Harpsichord at the Wrong Distance: Jean Rondeau Plays Couperin

When

28 November 2025, 7.30pm

Where

Wigmore Hall, London

Who

Jean Rondeau

What

Jean Rondeau playing Louis Couperin Suites in D, A and F.

Live Notes

The evening announced itself as something close to ideal: one of today’s most visible harpsichordists, in one of London’s most cherished halls, opening a multi-concert exploration of Louis Couperin. On paper, nothing was out of place. In practice, the most interesting thing about the concert was the tension between three elements that never quite aligned: an instrument that asks for proximity, a hall that insists on distance, and a programme concept that treated Couperin as though three suites could behave like a single, continuous “work” rather than like a collection of dances.

The programme grouped pieces into three suites in D, A and F. The D suite ran from Prélude No. 1 through Allemande No. 35, the twin Courantes Nos. 42 and 43, Sarabandes Nos. 49 and 51, Canaries No. 52, and the Chaconne “La Complaignante” No. 57. The A suite centred on the Prélude “à l’imitation de Froberger” No. 6, with Allemande No. 100, La Piémontaise No. 102, Courante No. 103, Sarabande No. 109, Courante “La Mignone” No. 105 and Sarabande No. 23. The F suite brought Prélude No. 13, Allemande Grave No. 67, Courante No. 68, Branle de Basque No. 73, Sarabande No. 74, Chaconne No. 78, and finally the Tombeau de Blancrocher No. 81. There was a clear harmonic and affective logic to this sequence: three tonal centres, each moving from prelude through dances to chaconne or tombeau, with the evening framed by two different kinds of lament.

Everything in that design pointed towards seriousness and continuity. What the concert revealed, however, was that neither the instrument nor the music is naturally aligned with the kind of continuity a hall like Wigmore presupposes.

The Hall and the Historical Distance

If one could listen only through a close-up microphone, the evening would have been almost entirely satisfying. But harpsichords are not abstract timbral ideas; they are small, directional wooden machines built for particular kinds of rooms and social situations. Couperin’s pieces come to us from spaces that were domestic or courtly rather than symphonic: salons, small chapels, shallow halls in which sound surrounded at arm’s length rather than being projected over hundreds of seats. Listening there was porous and social. People moved, spoke, shifted in and out of focus; the instrument articulated this milieu; it did not dominate a darkened room from a distant stage.

Wigmore Hall, for all its reputation for intimacy, is another kind of space. With its five hundred–plus seats and long shoebox shape, it is optimised for string quartets, singers and pianists who can fill the room with a single forte chord. Placing a single harpsichord on that stage, under deliberately low lighting, created an odd contradiction. From the back half of the hall the sound never quite left the instrument. It remained stubbornly localised: a small, intricate object in the distance rather than an acoustic field into which one could step.

There is nothing inherently wrong with hearing the harpsichord in a hall of this size; compromise with modern infrastructure is unavoidable. But here the conceptual framing tried to produce immersion by theatrical means—lighting, unbroken continuity—while the acoustic reality kept reminding one of the instrument’s scale. The music asked to be close; the room kept pushing it away.

Historical Function, Modern Ritual

Couperin’s suites are products of a world in which music had not yet been given the central, sacralised position it acquired in the nineteenth century. They are courtly and domestic objects: sequences of dances, laments and character pieces whose forms are short, whose temporality is sectional rather than teleological, and which were embedded in heterogeneous situations. Their task is to organise a series of local times: an allemande’s steady step, a courante’s irregular lilt, a sarabande’s suspended centre of gravity, a chaconne’s slow circling. One can enter and leave these times; they are successive rooms, not a single corridor.

Jean Rondeau © Clement Vayssieres

The Wigmore format assumed the opposite. The three suites were played straight through, with only the briefest breaks and no interval. Conceptually, this knits the material into one large span: three tonal regions, three inner arcs, one big idea of “Couperin”. For the audience, sitting in darkness in fixed rows, it produced a visible and audible strain. About halfway through the second suite, the symptoms were hard to ignore: bodies shifting in their seats more often than comfort alone would warrant; the small but insistent noise of programmes being handled; heads nodding forward then abruptly correcting themselves; a low rustle of suppressed coughs that no longer quite stayed suppressed. At the end of the first suite, one listener began to applaud. It was not a failure of manners so much as a physical response to a format that offered no natural points of release.

What emerged was a contradiction between two temporal regimes. On one side, the circular, sectional time of the dance suite, which turns back on itself, lingers, begins again. On the other, the long, linear time of the modern “serious” concert, which demands that the audience submit to an indivisible listening block. To bind three suites together and ask that they be heard as a quasi-symphonic whole is to load them with a weight they were not designed to carry. In the accelerated tempo of 2025, with its fragmented attention and permanent low-level distraction, that contradiction becomes even sharper. One can blame audiences for short attention spans, or presenters for unrealistic demands, but not the music, which was written for a quite different organisation of time.

My point is not that Wigmore Hall should adapt to this tension through marketable modernisation—relaxed concerts, wandering audiences, multimedia distraction. That would simply replace one inappropriate template with another and leave the actual demands of Couperin’s music untouched. What the evening suggested instead is that a historically attentive form might require going in the opposite direction: taking the instrument’s scale and the music’s modularity seriously, even if that means playing in smaller venues, selling fewer tickets.

Rondeau and the Illusion of Dynamics

Against this structural and architectural background, Rondeau’s playing itself was the least problematic element. Whatever reservations one might have about the format, they do not begin at the keyboard.

On a piano, one can think in sculpted blocks of sound: attack, bloom, decay that can be shaped and layered almost independently of the written rhythm. On the harpsichord that entire dimension is compressed. The string is plucked; the tone appears and drops away; the range of controllable loudness is extremely narrow. If one tries to play “more intensely” simply by force, the instrument refuses. What remains are time, articulation and registration.

Rondeau worked almost entirely in this condensed space. In contrapuntal passages he differentiated voices not by “making one louder” but by placing them slightly differently in time. A bass entry delayed by a hair’s breadth could suddenly become the foundation against which upper voices re-aligned themselves; a right-hand figure nudged minutely forward took on a nervous prominence without any change of volume. Inner voices in the allemandes and courantes surfaced briefly through these tiny shifts, then disappeared again into the surface texture. The illusion of dynamics—of one line stepping forward while another withdraws—was produced entirely by these micro-displacements.

The unmeasured preludes showed this most starkly. Their notation, with loose rhythmic values and only nominal bar-lines, derives from an improvisatory practice that presupposes a player capable of inventing a pulse as much as following one. Rondeau let the line uncoil with an almost vocal suppleness, moving between suspensions and arabesques with a sense of breathing that avoided both formlessness and mechanical regularity.

In the D major suite, this approach yielded a particularly clear contrapuntal profile. The first Courante, with its gently lopsided phrases, felt continuously alive, never merely “in time”; the second, following without pause, picked up the same rhythmic DNA and stretched it, as if turning the material in a different light. The Canaries, with its dance-derived snap, was articulated with dry precision, Rondeau resisting the temptation to smooth its edges into generic charm. The sarabandes were among the highlights of the evening: grave and spacious but never inert, their inner voices allowed to surface just long enough to suggest secondary melodies before being folded back.

“La Complaignante” at the close of the D suite became the first clear emotional centre. Over its repeating bass, Rondeau spun variations that nonetheless felt like a single, continuous gesture rather than a chain of episodes. The chaconne’s circular form—forever returning to the same ground, forever finding slightly different ways of traversing it—suited his pacing: patient, unforced, attentive to small harmonic inflections.

The A suite, headed by the Prélude “à l’imitation de Froberger”, opened a slightly different space. Where the D major prelude had felt characteristically French in its looseness, this one, paying homage to Froberger’s darker, more rhetorical idiom, carried a different kind of weight. Rondeau leaned into its angular writing without exaggeration, letting the line drop suddenly through the instrument’s registers and pick up chromatic tension en route. “La Piémontaise”, with its restless rhythmic profile, emerged as the moment where his virtuosity was most overt: fast passagework etched with clarity yet always locked to a palpable dance rhythm. The Courante “La Mignone” and Sarabande No. 23 turned back inward, once again relying on minute delays and anticipations to suggest a hierarchy of voices where the instrument offers almost none.

The final F suite brought the most openly sombre stretch of the programme: a prelude shaped less as display than as a slow opening of harmonic space; an Allemande Grave whose title is already a tempo and an affect; a Branle de Basque that provided a brief flash of extroversion tightly held in check; a chaconne less anguished than “La Complaignante” but no less intricate in its internal negotiations; and, as a kind of epilogue, the Tombeau de Blancrocher. Here Rondeau refused the easy tragic tone. The tombeau moved instead with austere dignity, dissonances registering clearly but never pushed into expressionistic profile. The final descent—quiet, controlled—was one of the few moments in the evening when the hall itself seemed to match the music’s scale and hold still.

Jean Rondeau © Clement Vayssieres

Across all of this, one had the sense of a player who understands that, on this instrument, “expression” is not something added from outside but something generated by the smallest adjustments in when and how notes sound. From close up, it is a compelling argument for the harpsichord. In the way it articulates time differently, distributes attention differently between voices, and proposes another model of what it means for a line to be “intense”, it will always be able to claim precedence over the piano for much of the repertoire written before the pianoforte established itself as the primary keyboard instrument.

What the Evening Actually Showed

By the time the final chord of the Tombeau de Blancrocher had evaporated and the house lights returned, what remained was a double impression. On one side, a persuasive demonstration of what the harpsichord can do when taken seriously on its own terms, capable—in Rondeau’s hands—of sustaining a dense hierarchy of voices with minimal dynamic means. On the other, a clear example of how rigidly a venue like Wigmore continues to apply the same ritual template to very different kinds of music.

The misalignment was not between Rondeau and Couperin; there was a clear affinity there, audible in his control of micro-timing, his refusal to over-dramatise, his willingness to let small changes of articulation carry the expressive burden. The misalignment lay between that affinity and the institutional form into which it was inserted. If Rondeau’s Couperin project is to continue in venues of this scale, the evening suggests where the real adjustment has to occur. It does not lie in curated informality—which only doubles down on the logic of entertainment—but in the opposite: a willingness to let the specific demands of this instrument and this music dictate the frame, even if that means fewer tickets sold.

Rondeau has already done the demanding work on the musical side. The question posed, quietly but insistently, by this concert is whether institutions are prepared to undertake the corresponding work on theirs: to scale the room, the format and the ritual to the music, rather than the other way round.