Airs de cour (Etienne Moulinié)

Albumbeschreibung

The French air de cour or court air was a genre of lute- or guitar-accompanied song that flourished during the years on either side of 1600. It is strict and rather sparse compared with the music being made in Italy at the time, and it shows little influence from Italian experimentation with declamation and with the strongly harmonic conception of the bass that would evolve into the basso continuo. The music is restrained and, for the modern listener, pleasant enough, with the composer represented here, Etienne Moulinié, apparently trying to work out new wrinkles on a small set of fixed forms. Moulinié was one of the most famous composers in this genre and his songs offer quite a bit of variety -- starting with the fact that he set texts in Italian and Spanish as well as French, and sometimes drew on the dance rhythms that were to lay the foundations for Baroque ground forms. This recording employs a variety of soloists, and the meaty voice of soprano Maria Cristina Kiehr commands special attention. Yet there's a sameness to the pieces that keeps the recording from being very interesting to anyone but specialists in music of the period. For the most part the music is not very expressively sung. One piece, Stelle homicide (Homicidal Stars) is also included on the Accent label's Echo de Paris disc of French love songs of the seventeenth century; sample the pair for an idea of the very restrained approach of this one. It's never unpleasant or poorly executed, but there's a bouncy feel to the music that eventually becomes monotonous. The booklet goes into a great deal of scholarly detail about the texts (some of them, one learns, had hidden political meanings) but leaves them untranslated except for the first line or two -- another sure mark of a disc aimed at specialists rather than at ordinary listeners.

© TiVo

Details of original recording : DDD - 61:30 - Enregistré à l'Eglise de Centeilles en Septembre 1990