The attraction here is the repertoire, music by six composers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Marin Marais gets star billing, but his Suite à 2 Violes has received much more sympathetic and warmer performances from Jordi Savall, as have M. de Sainte-Colombe’s Tombeau Les Regrets and the Concert Le Retour. There’s an unpleasant starchiness here that viola da gambists Jorge Daniel Valencia and Johanna Valencia never quite shake off, and nothing in this performance makes it preferable to Savall’s recording.
The remaining half of the disc relies on the novelty of hearing works by three other French composers of the period: Jacque Martin Hotteterre Le Romain (1680-1761), a court musician at Versailles; Michel Pignolet de Montéclair (1667-1737) who like Hotteterre was a theorist and composer; and Jacques Morel (d. 1740), a student of Marais. While these pieces’ presence makes this recording at least scholastically interesting, the performances are terribly grating–especially Johanna Valencia’s sour tone when she performs on recorder. Of course, the technical obstacles to keeping these instruments in tune are well known, but the poor intonation here is far too frequent to be ignored.
Valencia has a marked tendency to sail downward into excruciating flatness, with the movement marked “Le Rémouleur” in Montéclair’s Deuxième Concert an especially alarming example. The title means knife- or scissors-sharpener, and while the recorder’s sudden register changes between low and high are meant to be whimsical, our previous run-ins with Valencia’s tone make the overall affect quite ghastly. Another detriment is the sound; the selections with recorder place Valencia miles in front of the other players. Jürgen Kroemer’s harpsichord often gets lost in the shuffle, and it’s very hard to hear Thomas C. Boysen’s theorbo at all.
