French music of the eighteenth century was not mere background but an essential part of the splendid festivities and performances and equally of intimate gatherings. Composers and musicians did not belong to society, yet they shaped its atmosphere decisively. In this music one therefore encounters its surroundings as well: artful, elegant, precious, at times hard to grasp behind magnificent ornamentation, sensual beneath a highly cultivated surface and sometimes, for all its tasteful lightness, full of melancholy.
That several pieces are about love is no accident — love was the social game par excellence, charming in its flirtation and seduction, against a background of vulnerability that no one showed. The programme presents the two performers’ personal engagement with that world.
Jacques Martin Hotteterre “le Romain” came from a famous family of composers and instrument makers; best known is his tutor Principes de la flûte of around 1707, which explains the playing of the transverse flute, the recorder and the oboe and gives important guidance on the art of ornamentation. In his Suite in G major each movement carries an additional name: La cascade de St. Cloud refers to a famous cascade where fashionable society took its walks, La Guimon perhaps to the name of a celebrated beauty.
From François Couperin come Le Rossignol en amour, Le Petit Rien, the two musettes de Choisi and de Taverni and the title piece Il Ritratto dell’amore, from Jean-Philippe Rameau the Musette en rondeau and the Tambourin. The twentieth century and the present answer them: Albert Roussel’s Pipe in D major, Francis Poulenc’s Villanelle, Darius Milhaud’s Exercice Musical and the Raga du Prince by Majoie Hajary of 1996.
The recording was made in November 1998 in the Meistersaal am Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, supported by the Stiftung Kunst und Kultur des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen.
The CD runs to 66:05; the booklet has texts in German, English and French. Jeremias Schwarzer plays several recorders, Egon Mihajlovic harpsichord and harmonium — a combination that gives this programme, poised between historical performance practice and a freer way of thinking about sound, its particular appeal. The frame is formed by François Couperin’s Il Ritratto dell’amore with its eight character pieces and the Suite in G major by Jacques Martin Hotteterre; between them stand Rameau’s musette and tambourin and, as a bridge into the twentieth century, pieces by Albert Roussel, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud and Majoie Hajary’s Raga du Prince of 1996.