Charles-François Clément Sonatas en Trio
Johann Sebastian Bach had made the trio sonata for two instruments, namely violin and harpsichord, a rather novel idea. Trio sonatas by design are for three parts, but composers looked for ways to economize the design of two melody instruments against a bass in creative ways. Clément’s sonatas for violin and harpsichord are written in a similar way, with the right hand of the keyboard forming the second melody voice.
Like Bach, Clément was a keyboard player and having been a later contemporary, applied this thinking toward this collection of six sonatas, here realized by Augustin Lusson (violin) and Iakovos Pappas (harpsichord). I auditioned this new release via Qobuz and was disappointed there were no liner notes.
I am not familiar with Clément as a composer and so the arrival of this new recording was a treat. Both players approach the music with requisite French flair. The harpsichord used has adequate bass reach which should be important appearing without additional bass. Nevertheless I would like to hear one of these sonatas with a gamba or cello reading the bass line as well, not for any necessarily historical reasons, but for the tickle of hearing even more bass.
Lusson is a young and extrovertly expressive type of player who I think does an excellent service to this music. I enjoy every time he comes to the end of a phrase; the composer has either left him a double stop or some other ornamental gem to delight us both.
The sound quality of this recording is good; it’s captured without an excess of reverb and appropriately comes across as musique du salon. The music’s writing puts the violinist and keyboard player in a tight lock at many times, especially so in the faster movements. Both musicians do an excellent job at sounding as one when it’s appropriate to do so.
Clément died in the later half of the eighteenth century and so he was a contemporary of Rameau. There is a far closer stylistic match to the Concerts Rameau wrote for chamber instruments than the violin and harpsichord sonatas by Bach. The opening of the fourth sonata in particular could be realized by a single keyboard player. The melodic contributions from the keyboard are secondary to the main melody; I do wonder if these ever had solo versions as did the Rameau Concerts.
The entire disc was a welcome discovery. I hope we get to hear more by Clément. Both his rhetorical style and the interpretations here are in support of praise. The small but noticeable slides of the violinist as part of the French style of playing is so well done that I can only imagine it sounding stale by someone who didn’t place such rhetorical weight on the longer notes in composer’s phrasing.
The other noteworthy thing I can say is that there seems to be some semblance of comedy at play in these works; it’s born out of the melodies themselves, as if the composer were smiling as he wrote them. That, we cannot know, but Papps and Lusson play into the sentiment more than once and I thought it was a delight to hear the musical equivalent of a clever smile.
Great recording. Would have enjoyed liner notes and more details about sonata keys in the Qobuz database.
