Alexandre Tharaud

French Baroque music on the piano? Alexandre Tharaud shows that it works! His CD 'Tic toc choc' is ideal shock therapy for the purists of early music, his playing of Couperin's keyboard miniatures on the modern grand simply breathtakingly beautiful. With great feeling for baroque rhetoric and the art of seduction, he transposes the richness of colour and atmosphere of Couperin's characteristic pieces onto the modern piano. Moreover, he brings a similarly refreshing sensuality to the sonatas of Scarlatti. Chopin - according to harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, "the Couperin of the nineteenth century" - is another great love of Tharaud's. This composer's Second Sonata contains the most famous funeral march in the history of music, a piece that that has accompanied no end of funerals, not excepting Chopin's own. It is but a short leap from Chopin's Funeral March to Liszt's 'Funérailles'. Because of its caption 'Octobre 1849', this work has been repeatedly regarded as having been written in homage to Chopin, who died on 17 October 1849. However, the work was written as a heroic tribute to the composer's friends who had been killed that year in the Hungarian uprising against the Habsburgs.