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Reviewer: Barry
Brenesal The remarkable thing about the music of Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (1689–1755) isn’t its quality, which is highly uneven, but that he could produce so much of it while still finding time to conduct, instruct, publish, and act the wit in various aristocratic salons. So much did he compose, in fact, that between 1724 and 1747 he wrote and issued over 102 collections (usually six compositions per opus) of his own instrumental and vocal works. The music theorist Jean-Benjamin de Laborde reported in 1780 that there had been a couplet which was popular in Paris at the height of the composer’s most fruitful period: “Happy, prolific Boismortier, who can, every month, without sorrow, give birth to a volume!” To all such jests, and to the far more acidic comments of critics, the composer invariably responded, “I’m earning money.” And he did, silver hand over golden fist, neither needing nor seeking patronage, but dying an extremely wealthy, music-making factory.
Le Petit Trianon has chosen a judicious selection of Boismortier’s chamber music that show off his talents well. There’s ample display of his melodic gifts, his rhythmic vivacity, and his keen understanding of the instruments he writes for. He absorbs at his best the styles of his contemporaries without parroting back their works—as two of his Rameau-influenced harpsichord pieces on this album, La décharnée and La valetudinaire, demonstrate. Boismortier was suavely adept at les goûts réunis; the finale of his three-movement Sonate V in A Minor, op. 37, is a hybrid beast, part gavotte, part musette, part tarantella. His Sonate VI in D Major, op. 50, is purely Italian, with a meltingly lyrical opening movement, but another D-Major work, the Sonate II from his op. 41 collection, is thoroughly French in the cut of its musical cloth. Alternately delicate and witty, the effect of this music is not unlike listening to a gifted conversationalist, which was supposedly true of Boismortier.
The performances are a good match for the music. Le Petit Trianon is a young ensemble, formed in 2012 in Geneva by three students at the Haute Ecole de Musique. For this album, they were joined by Xavier Marquis and Paolo Corsi, both also associated with the school. They phrase flexibly and ornament sensibly, though I find the violinist’s tone a bit wiry and the swelling of tone, at times overdone in slower movements. There’s a real sense within Le Petit Trianon of engagement among its musicians, the kind of pleasure one gets from musicians who enjoy what they’re doing together, regardless of their performance level.
The liner notes are extensive, hagiographic, and at times, inaccurate. Stating, for instance, that Boismortier’s works which contain parts for the flute, violin, and cello “were always based upon the Italian sonata da chiesa” ignores the fact that one of the two works on this album for that combination of instruments isn’t based on that form: the Sonate V in G Minor, op. 37, in the Italian sinfonia form of three movements, fast-slow-fast. (As much can be said of the Sonata II in E Minor from that collection, not on this disc.) The author also repeatedly praises Boismortier for using short melodic ideas that can be varied and recalled at will, in terms that lead one to believe he invented this, when it was a commonplace of the Italian-based style galant in France. Manfred Bukofzer discussed this as far back as 1947 in his Music in the Baroque Era, so it shouldn’t be a surprise today. That aside, this is a fine release of truly engaging music in fine performances, with excellent sound. Recommended. | |
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