Marais - Tombeau pour Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe
I remember seeing Tous les matins du monde in college, likely the first French language film I’d seen. Much of the music in that film, for me, was a revelation, my first in-depth exposure to a world of baroque music I’d yet to have experienced. In this release from La Rêveuse, led by Florence Bolton and Benjamin Perrot, we get pieces by Marais’s second book, including his famous piece Les Voix Humaines and a Tombeau by Marais’ teacher, M. Sainte-Colombe. The era for this music coincides with that of Corelli’s opus 5 sonatas for violin and continuo. A Chaconne from de Visée is also included, track 13.
Perrot (theorbo and guitar) and Bolton (viola da gamba) is joined by Emily Audouin (viola da gamba) and Carsten Lohff on harpsichord. Bolton herself had written the notes for this album which for reasons I still cannot understand, Harmonia Mundi prints in the most minuscule font sizes. Which is to say, if you never saw the movie featuring Marais’ and Saint-Colombe’s relationship, there’s ample historical material provided to enjoy this concert in its context, as Marais the young and estimable talent.
This recording opens with an E minor suite in five movements. For us, I think the important elements to recognize in this music are the harmonic language, which is supported with the addition of instruments to provide harmonic support (continuo), and the rhetorical gestures that act as a kind of parade of musico-emotional ideas. They are then fit into the containers of baroque dance. The suite ends with the Tombeau for Sainte-Colombe. Tombeaux were tribute pieces for the dead. The tombeau here lasts nearly seven minutes, complete with some slides. Bolton in some regards is not the most extrovert player, but I felt her combination of affective elements did well to keep the line and musical ideas fluent for today’s listener.
The D minor suite ends with a named piece, the Cloches ou Carillon. Of course, bells play a role in the famous piece by Marais, published some twenty years later, the Sonnerie de Sainte-Geneviève du Mont de Paris. This piece isn’t nearly as grand in effect, but the bell effect is one that serves as a basis for the composer’s odd theme. Its fragmented nature speaks to a phantasticus style of composition, collecting multiple and contrasting musical ideas together. The theme of ringing bells helps to hold the work together.
The Tombeau Les Regrets is a nice addition to the pieces by Marais, as it allows us to hear something from Saint-Colombe’s sound world. It’s smaller in scope, its pieces collected as one track on this album. The piece, too, is constructed for two viols. Audouin and Bolton are well balanced with equally good sound. This suite, as a whole, lacks the strong harmonic language in Marais’ pieces and for that reason is a welcome contrast, speaking of this program as a concert concept.
Robert de Visée is known to me as a composer of the lute, and the Chaconne (track 13) is realized by Perrot by himself, another nice contrast. The filigree he achieves with his nimble fingers is technically brilliant.
Les Voix humaines makes a reference to the viol as being an equivalent to the human voice in his power to move us. Just as La Rêveuse took its name from a piece, so did Susie Napper for her viol group. I appreciated in this performance how Bolton and colleagues have applied breathing to their playing; whereas some performances feel like a continual phrase or expression from start to finish, like elsewhere, the Rêveuse take short breaks before phrases. It’s an appropriate ending to the album, perhaps, always for me inciting a reflective disposition.
Before this piece, Bolton et al. include several of the variations from Folies d’Espagne through which Marais takes a popular Spanish dance sequence and applies his own skill to the art of variation. The overall length of this album exceeds sixty minutes, but I would have enjoyed the entire sequence of variations! It has remained a favorite of mine, performed by William Hunt with the Purcell Quartet, an older recording I still remember fondly.
The sound conveyed on this disc is close, immediate, and ripe in detail. I’ve often found great transparency as the norm for recordings by La Rêveuse, and this is no exception. Using headphones, as is how I auditioned this recording, you can turn down the volume to get a sense for what this music sounds like in chamber; the effect is easier to come by using loudspeakers. Turned up a tad, the recording puts us in the immediate space of the musicians. There is however still some depth, putting Bolton in the front. I enjoyed being close tin this recording. The engineer, Hugues Deschaux, is the very same who I think did an outstanding job in capturing the recording of Mozart’s Requiem by Pygmalion.
I don’t want to discount any of the other recordings that have tackled Marais’ second book. But I found Bolton’s approach to be straightforward, rendering the music with good detail. Overt drama is avoided. The recorded sound compliments the artists’ contributions well.
