Mishka Rushdie Momen: Hall of Mirrors CD

For her second album, Mishka Rushdie Momen turns from England to France and jumps forward two generations to the court of Louis XIV and in particular to the music of Versailles. Mishka explores keyboard works by two acknowledged giants and one near-unknown.

François Couperin was one of Louis XIV’s first new organists of the Royal Chapel, part of a dynasty that forms a kind of French counterpart to that of the Bach family in Germany. The music’s warmth, brilliant resonance and musical language, designed for the grand spaces of Versailles, make it eminently suitable for performance on a modern grand piano.

It is hard to overstate the impression Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre made as a child prodigy of Louis XIV’s court and later as France’s first great woman composer. Contemporaries described her as ‘the marvel of our age’, ‘a prodigy of a different sort’. At the age of just twenty, her first dramatic work was premiered at Versailles, and aged 22 she presented her first collection of harpsichord pieces to the King. At 29 she published the opera ‘Céphale et Procris’, the first by a female hand in France. Mishka presents Jacquet’s florid Suite in G minor which nods to Louis Couperin but adds even greater dramatic Italianate touches: this is the first piano recording of the work.

The remainder of the album explores the strikingly original Suite in E minor of Jean-Philippe Rameau, which mixes the typical dance movements of the age with ‘gigues’ in the Scottish or Irish style alongside utterly unusual character pieces such as ‘Le rappel des oiseaux’, often translated as ‘a conference of the birds’.

Tracklist:
1. Couperin: Pièces de clavecin, Book 1 - 4e Ordre No 4: Le Réveil-matin
2. Couperin: L’art de Toucher le Clavecin - No 1: Premier Prélude
3. Couperin: Pièces de clavecin, Book 3 - 18e Ordre No 6: Le Tic-Toc-Choc ou les Maillotins
4. Couperin: Pièces de clavecin, Book 4 - 25e Ordre No 5: Les ombres errantes
5. Couperin: L’art de Toucher le Clavecin - No 8: Huitième Prélude
6. Rameau: Suite in E minor - Movement 1: Allemande
7. Rameau: Suite in E minor - Movement 2: Courante
8. Rameau: Suite in E minor - Movement 3a: Gigue en rondeau I
9. Rameau: Suite in E minor - Movement 3b: Gigue en rondeau II
10. Rameau: Suite in E minor - Movement 4: Le rappel des oiseaux
11. Rameau: Suite in E minor - Movement 5: Rigaudons I, II & double
12. Rameau: Suite in E minor - Movement 6: Musette en rondeau
13. Rameau: Suite in E minor - Movement 7: Tambourin
14. Rameau: Suite in E minor - Movement 8: La villageoise (rondeau)
15. Jacquet: Suite No 2 in G minor - No 1: Prélude
16. Jacquet: Suite No 2 in G minor - No 2: Allemande
17. Jacquet: Suite No 2 in G minor - No 3: Courante I
18. Jacquet: Suite No 2 in G minor - No 4: Courante II
19. Jacquet: Suite No 2 in G minor - No 5: Sarabande
20. Jacquet: Suite No 2 in G minor - No 6: Gigue I
21. Jacquet: Suite No 2 in G minor - No 7: Gigue II
22. Jacquet: Suite No 2 in G minor - No 8: Menuet & double
23. Couperin: Pièces de clavecin, Book 4 - 22e Ordre No 6: Les tours de passe-passe
24. Couperin: L’art de Toucher le Clavecin - No 6: Sixième Prélude
25. Couperin: Pièces de clavecin, Book 3 - 14e Ordre No 6: Le carillon de Cithère
26. Couperin: Quatrième concert royal - Movement 7: Forlane: Rondeau