I think it would have to be said that I’m now more a conductor than harpsichord player, although I still practice as much as I can, even if it is not that frequently. As a harpsichordist, there are more offers of concerts than it is now possible for me to accept. What surprises me is that since I have become known as a conductor, more people come to my recitals. So it’s rather nice to have bigger audiences, rather than the thirty or forty who used to come.

That’s interesting. I suppose the explanation is that concerts and opera have a higher profile, so having a name in those fields helps to build recital audiences.

Exactly. And for a musician it’s obviously always good to know that your work is coming before as large a number of people as possible. As a conductor you can touch more people and probably the widest audience I have ever had was for the film Farinelli Il Castrato.

Let’s go back to the beginning. I understand you first took an interest in the harpsichord at an age when most of us are still struggling with the piano. Why the harpsichord?

It was started by a general fascination for the past. For me the harpsichord was a time machine. So when I heard and then played the harpsichord, it gave me an ambition to return to the past. I grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where I was fascinated by the architecture and archaeology of an area rich in Roman remains. My first intention was to become an archaeologist, and after that to be an architect. But all I wanted to do was build eighteenth century palaces! So when I understood that was not possible these days, I discovered that I was best able to reflect that taste for the past in music, especially Baroque music and the harpsichord.

The repertoire you developed as a harpsichordist reveals not only the expected affinity with the French school of clavecin composers, but also with Bach. It would be interesting to hear your understanding of how the accepted French influence determines the style of Bach’s keyboard works.

What you say about the French influence is obviously true and I remember that while still a student at The Hague, a colleague put that same topic to me. He said I was playing Bach as French music, but that I shouldn’t take that as a criticism, but as a compliment because Bach liked and was fascinated by the French repertoire, which he tried to imitate as much as possible. I don’t really think I play Bach as I would French music, but I try to follow Leonhardt’s idea, which is that to make the instrument sound as beautiful as possible you adopt the French technique, which is that described by Couperin and Rameau in their treatises. That involves playing the harpsichord legato, playing with the fingers very near to the keyboard and using the articulation for expressive purposes, while trying to make the instrument, which can sound very dry, as rich as possible. Obviously, when I play seventeenth century Italian music like Frescobaldi, I try to make the harpsichord sound differently and also try to adapt my technique to all kinds of different instruments, which I try to make sound as they might have done in the respective period. That is more of a mental approach that takes into account that every composer naturally had his own specific ideas on the harpsichord and wanted the instrument to sound in a different way. They trusted the harpsichord in varying ways. I believe that many contemporary harpsichord players don’t trust the instrument enough, thinking that it is not expressive. They don’t try sufficiently to make it sing, to produce the necessary legato. A lot of the playing I hear makes the harpsichord sound dead and uninteresting. My idea is to play as lightly as possible and to give the instrument a sonority as broad as possible, as rich as possible, according to the repertoire.