François Couperin’s Pièces de Clavecin comprise 240 works divided into twenty-seven ordres (another name for the suite of dances). Published in four books from 1713 to 1730, they are the quintessence of his art. These four books are also the work of a musician who had reached his maturity. In 1713, the date of publication of the first of them, François was forty-five years old. He had retained the title of maître de clavecin, but the position entailed few obligations. His royal pupils had grown up or died. Since 1694, the date of his appointment as maître de clavecin des Enfants de France, he had written dozens of pieces graded by technical difficulty. These were intended for the Dauphin, the Duke of Burgundy, Mademoiselle de Nantes, Mademoiselle de Blois, and Louis Alexandre de Bourbon, the son of Madame de Montespan. His fame had led to fraudulent copies of his works. This was one of the reasons François chose to supervise their publication himself. The first book of 1713 still refers to it in its nomenclature: the allemande, the courante, the sarabande, the gavotte, the minuet, the rigaudon. The chosen mode, major or minor, gives the succession of movements its unity. The suite often closes with a chaconne, a passacaille, or a tombeau, a form reserved for musical glorification of or deferential homage to a deceased personage.

Born in Angers in 1973, Violaine Cochard began studying the harpsichord with Françoise Marmin at the conservatoire there. In 1991 she was awarded a Premier Prix in the instrument, and the same year entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musiquen, Paris in the classes of Kenneth Gilbert and Christophe Rousset. She is a founder member of the award-winning ensemble Amarillis, and devotes much of her time to performing chamber music with Il Seminario Musicale.