Naudot

By chance now I have found this rip that completes and improves what I have published two weeks ago. The tracks are lossless. TELDEC has added a Naudot's Concert for recorder, two violins and basso continuo op.XVII/5: Frans Brüggen plays the recorder and Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducts the Concentus Musicus Wien.

While the music offered in this recording spans only thirty-two years, it best exemplifies the development of French musical style and taste in the eighteenth century. By the middle of the century the unification of both the Italian and French styles of music composition termed by Franois Couperin as les gots-runis had been realised. This disc of chamber music modestly charts the journey through this change from Montclair and Morel through Leclair and Naudot to Rameau.

Musettes, hurdy-gurdies, and flutes formed the dream countryside of Rococo-style salons, that of Watteau’s painting Concert Champêtre (1727), when Naudot’s Fantaisies were enjoying their hour of glory. The fashion for “pastoralism” was in full swing, and professional musicians as well as great amateurs vied with each other in “pastoral” concertos where musettes and hurdy-gurdies featured heavily. These instruments were popular originally, garnering great skill to rise to the heights of virtuoso: enough to enchant Louis XV’s courtesans and those close to La Pompadour! Alexis Kossenko reveals these wonderfully outdated gems to us as a bold shepherd.

The recorder played a huge part in 18th-century European music, so it’s strange that this beautiful instrument doesn’t command the attention it deserves today. Enter Dutch player Lucie Horsch with a Baroque feast of thrilling arrangements and wonderful, original works for recorder. Dive into the magical, virtuosic worlds of Castello, Naudot, and Sammartini—whose Concerto in F Majoris a sparkling discovery—and relive famous pieces that shine anew. The voice flute used for “Erbarme dich” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion has a breathtaking vocal quality, while Horsch joins fellow recorder player Charlotte Barbour-Condini for a joyful, energizing performance of Handel’s “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.” Utterly inspiring.

This collection of baroque hurdy-gurdy music represents, in a way, that instrument's comeback after a century of neglect and scorn (although, one presumes, that back then the scorn was at least being heaped upon the actual hurdy-gurdy, and not the glorified music box that has usurped its name in the current popular imagination). In the medieval period, the hurdy-gurdy was depicted as being played by angels as the appropriate accompaniment to the singing of the Psalms. However, its association with peasants (not to mention the limited range of the instrument in the pre-baroque era) tainted its musical reputation considerably. Relegated to an attention-getting device of blind beggars, the hurdy-gurdy was a solidly lower class instrument.

Jean-Pierre Rampal is often considered the greatest flutist of the modern era. In addition to his exceptional talent, he raised the flute to unprecedented solo status, popularizing the flute literature, the flute recital and flute recordings. The rediscovery of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic repertoire for the flute is one of his outstanding achievements, as well as his numerous collaborations with composers; over 100 works have been written for and premiered by him. He recorded for Erato from the mid-1950s, with many discs receiving awards internationally.

French composers increasingly turned to the elaborate charms with which their Italian colleagues were winning the favor of the music public. They blended their own precise and strict style with the Italian gusto, as we hear on this CD.