Magyar Narancs: Les Forjerons
Perhaps no era in music history is a treasure trove so overflowing as Baroque. That is partly because in those times even so-called little masters (Kleinmeister) were able to write excellent pieces given that technical mastery in that period played a greater role in music creation than in later eras. The same principle prevailed through the Classicist era, however, by the Romantic era a Little master became mostly a synonym of insignificant or just bad composer.
One of the brilliant little masters of French Baroque was Paris born composer Jean-Jacques-Baptiste Anet (1676–1755) a student of Arcangelo Corelli for four years in Rome in his youth to the utmost satisfaction of his master. Anet then returned to France, and established the style of the Italian violin school in his homeland. He was a noted player, and composer throughout his life leaving three sonata series to posterity. He is considered as the most important French violinist of the pre-Leclair era.
The CD now published offers a selection of the material of the first, and the third volume of sonatas. We have eight works, most of them consisting not of four but of five or six movements, and some of which conform to movement types known from suites: Allemande, Sarabande, and Gigue. The finale of the fifth piece of volume 1 is the movement titled Les Forjerons also the title of the album.
Each performance is excellent. The elegant, easy movements of chatty tone unfold with a natural immediacy on the violin of Szabolcs Illés, a student of Sigiswald Kuijken. The artist, member of La Petite Bande for a long period plays with self-evident elegance, talkatively and virtuosically same as his two fellow-musicians Kinga Gáborjáni (baroque cello) and Fanni Edőcs (harpsichord). It is an enjoyable new, historic album that widens the view of the lovers of the genre.
Kristóf Csengery
Source: Magyar Narancs