Corrette, M.: Symphonies des noels / Concertos comiques (Michel Corrette)

Album review

This little disc emerging from Montreal's fertile historical-performance scene offers music unlike any other from the French Baroque or Classical periods most listeners will have heard before. Michel Corrette, a Parisian (and Rouen-born) organist and prolific composer, wrote works that might be called light music of the eighteenth century. The genres represented here, the Symphonies des Noels and the Concerto comique, differ in their movement structure (the Symphonies des Noel may have a longer sequence of short movements) but are nevertheless cut from the same cloth. Corrette builds his structures out of strings of short, binary tunes, many of them quoted from popular songs and carols. The music no doubt had a dimension of humor in its own time that is difficult to reconstruct at this distance, even with the help of the informative booklet notes by François Filiatrault (the English translation by Fred A. Reed alters certain details). But the music is colorful and filled with programmatic strokes that reflect the musical fashion parade that passed through the long life of Corrette, who was still composing in his 87th and final year. Even if it is difficult to say exactly what is "américain" about the penultimate Allegro of the Symphonie des Noels No. 4 in D minor, the opening "La turque" movement of the Concerto comique No. 19 in A major (track 29) is a striking early example of the Turkish style. The titles of most of the popular tunes quoted are given in the track list, and inasmuch as some of them have appeared in other works (or devolved into popular carols) they will be recognized as they go by. Unusual strokes of instrumentation such as a timpani further break up the texture of a program that could have been monotonous; an audience of Corrette's time would not have heard many concertos in a row like this. The veteran Montreal group Arion plays the music with the broad humor it requires, although the brittle-bright cathedral sound works at cross purposes with what it is trying to do. Recommended not only for French Baroque enthusiasts (the music is really Baroque in style, even though some of it was composed as late as 1781), but also potentially useful for anyone staging a French drama of the eighteenth century.
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