Le cabinet de curiosités
This album, featuring harpsichordist Anastasie Jeanne, a name with which I’m not familiar, features 70 minutes of music from composers you likewise probably are not familiar. The two composers represented include Jean-Jacques Beauvarlet-Charpentier and, curiously, Simon Simon. Both composers were born in 1734, with Simon outliving Beauvarlet by seventeen years.
The booklet notes give this recital some context:
To my way of thinking, the work of Simon and Beauvarlet-Charpentier reflects a period that feels as though it is suspended in time, aspiring to a kind of hedonism and an insouciance which was never again to be found over subsequent centuries. Their pieces, whose casual manner shows through in music which is often called “imperfect”, have been overlooked by our scholarly modern musicology for far too long, and this is why I now wish to give this misunderstood fragment of history back all its radiance, dignity and grandeur.
The style, given the music’s age, is baroque, but in a way that betrays what we might otherwise consider the late claveniste style, of say, Rameau. This is not exactly galante, but the style is nevertheless fresh and showcases an evolution of keyboard style. Simon was given the job of teaching King Louis XV’s children. Beauvarlet is given credit in the notes as being more forward-looking in approach, heralding the new era to be dominated by the pianoforte.
You can hear this clearly in the fourth track, with Beauvarlet’s La Suzanne. The immediate picture that comes to mind for me is Tom Hulce playing Mozart in the film Amadeus sitting at a harpsichord. Which is a stark contrast to the “second suite” by Simon, wherein Jeanne has added parts for violin and cello, making a connection for me to Rameau’s own Pièces de clavecin en concerts, that, while not exactly looking backward, seems less melody-driven than the previous pieces by Beauvarlet-Charpentier.
Jeanne is joined by Émile Clément-Planche on baroque violin and Julianna David on cello. I appreciate their erudite notes that include not only the makers of their bows but also the specifics of each of their instruments’ strings.
The album continues with works by Simon, culled all from his first opus, with pieces from the fifth suite and sixth “concerto.” For me these pieces are so much fun; they each contain their own brand of drama, including the seventh and eighth tracks, especially.
The sixth, marked “suite concerto” and the three movements here named “La la Font” is stylistically far from the music of J.S. Bach, but there is a synergy with his legacy of putting the keyboard out front, in charge “finally”, moving the import of the keyboard out of the role of a basso continuo instrument. But interesting too is the difference in style—here notably French—from what Bach’s sons Carl Philipp Emmanuel and Wilhelm Friederman wrote. Perhaps it’s in the role of the violin part, especially, that seems rooted in the past? I obviously don’t have access to these scores but would love to see them. However these three women have approached these performances, they are full of personality and sensitivity to the rich changes in affect among the pieces. Stylistically they are not too far from the concertos by Michel Corrette. Covello Classics has an album dedicated to Corrette’s concertos by the Orchester Le Phénix worth exploring.
The effort on this disc of course is chamber-oriented, and leaving the Covello album, I was again reminded how well this album was recorded. The level of reverb seems perfect, and the balance among instruments for when they are playing together, is ideal, with Jeanne taking full advantage of her instrument’s ability to alter its sound via two 8’ and one 4’ course of strings, and a stop to mute one of the keyboards.
The other association I have with this music is with the art by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, likely the most famous, his painting “The Swing” or L'Escarpolette. It’s roughly simultaneous with this music and the figuration given to the keyboard in track 13–La la Font Vif to me seems a perfect audible foil to the style of Fragonard’s painterly style.
The album ends with a return to Jean-Jacques Beauvarlet–Charpentier’s music, featuring the harpsichord alone. The repeated figures in the left-hand aren’t new to baroque music, but it was a style, in the guise of an “Alberti bass” that became a popular component to classical style. It posits the right hand’s melody out front, leaving behind the perhaps out-dated reliance upon dance forms for a keyboard suite. But I’m left unaware of the function of this music, despite the attractiveness of its melodic content. It seems nearly unjust that one couldn’t dance to this type of music.
But it is entertainment for those who had means. This last track, La Bressol, but especially for me, the pieces by Simon, are strong efforts to continue old traditions into a new, enlightened world. The music, as a collection, is delightful, without ever approaching the profound. But I do like albums like these, that introduce us to new music that challenges our understanding of history. Of course, the French continued to make music outside the baroque period, but our blinders oft turn to the music of Haydn and then Mozart and Beethoven as the definitive style-makers.
This album shows us what was offered ahead of France’s revolution. While all of this music was extremely well-interpreted, I think you’ll find the music by Simon Simon to be especially rich.
