Shifra Jacquet Svironi

After the success of her recordings with music by Vivaldi, Biber, and Corelli, Lina Tur Bonet focuses for this new release on the French female composer Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, a protegee of Louis XIV. The six Sonates pour le viollon et pour le clavecin by Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, dedicated to Louis XIV, appeared in Paris in 1707, the year when the models and the most recent invenzioni of the Italian sonata arrived in France, immediately captivating composers such as Louis-Antoine Dornel, Michel Blavet, Francois Couperin and Jean-Marie Leclair l’aine.

ESOTERIC proudly introduces a series of re-master collection - A great Jazz collection. The reissue of historical music masterpieces by ESOTERIC has attracted a lot of attention, both for its uncompromising commitment to recreating the original master sound, and for using SACD technology to improve sound quality. This Box Set of "Verve 6 Great Jazz" features masterpiece releases of Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington & Johnny Hodges, Lester Young & Teddy Wilson, Illinois Jacquet, Dizzy Gillespie/Sonny Stitt/Sonny Rollins, Ben Webster & Art Tatum. Not only for new followers, but also for well experienced followers of these recorded materials.

Acclaimed in her own time as ‘the wonder of our century’, Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729) occupies a place of outstanding importance in the cultural history of 17th and 18th-century France as a composer and harpsichordist. Her prodigious talents were recognised from when she played and sang to the court of King Louis XIV at the tender age of five years old.

Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre has no reason to be ashamed to finally find herself alongside Chambonnières and Couperin in the discography devoted to the 17th century harpsichord. This is what the scholarly booklet of this new album tells us. Almost unknown today, yet she enjoyed a great reputation during her lifetime. And for good reason. Her inspired compositions exploit all the registers of the harpsichord, giving generosity and brightness to her works.

It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de Musique who quoted the philosopher Fontenelle’s famous outburst ‘Sonata, what do you want from me?’. The Italian sonata was the fashion in France at that time and composers had abandoned the character pieces and the works in dance forms that had typified French music until then. Couperin, a proud champion of French music who was nonetheless attracted by the charms of Italian music, had tried to reconcile the musical tastes of the two nations by giving illustrative titles to the various movements of his sonatas.

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was a virtuoso harpsichordist, as well as the author of many pioneering works. She left an abundant output of cantatas, both secular and sacred. Here the soprano Maïlys de Villoutreys, Héloise Gaillard and her Ensemble Amarillis pay tribute to her with the cantatas Judith and Sémélé, inspired by two women, who embody virtue and courage on the one hand, temerity and pride on the other. Whether intimate or more operatic, both works highlight the composer’s innate sense of drama.

Matthew Gee (1925-1979), who belatedly had the opportunity to record this album, “Jazz by Gee!,” his first and only one as a leader, in 1956, was one of many talented jazzmen who earned the solid and lasting respect of his peers without ever achieving the public recognition they clearly deserved. Leonard Feather described Gee as one of the “best and most underrated of bop-influenced trombonists.”