As a matter of fact, this the sole recording Leonhatdt made which is dedicated to Louis Couperin has taken me a long time to get into. Years. Now I think it is a masterpiece.
The reason I found it so challenging is that Leonhardt avoids any attention seeking behaviour. He doesn't woo the listener with either obviously virtuosic keyboard effects, or by grabbing on to and emphasising attractive tunes in the music.
There's a self effacing quality at the emotional level too, and in a rather special sense. It would be grossly misleading to suggest that Leonhardt's style here is cold or "academic" or aloof or inhumane or inexpressive. But I do think that the expression is depersonalised: the emotions are there aplenty, but they're not
Leonhardt's emotions: there's never the sense that he is
expressing himself rather than
expressing the music. That's to say, we have here a performance of great abandon: Leonhardt abandons his own ego.
The result is something which is probably justly described with the word "reticent": when Leonhardt plays he's not saying "me, me, me, just listen to me and what I can do and how intensely I feel the bliss and the pain" And for me, because of that impersonality, that abstraction, it was easy not to bother listening.
But if you do listen, rather than just let it wash over you, its qualities are really remarkable. There's great care to achieve a sort of fluid and continuous quality to the sound, which gives the music an almost languid quality, languid in a positive way: unhurried and relaxed. It's rich at the level of effect, and there's a great sense of forward momentum and pace and living pulse.
Above all there's the rapturous preludes: I think Leonhardt is particularly impressive in the preludes and it makes me wish he would have been more open to improvisation.
