La Conversation

Album review

France's Alpha label has performed a valuable service with a series of releases, featuring uniformly fine performances mostly of Renaissance and Baroque music, that illuminate the cultural context of the music being performed with a reproduction and discussion of a relevant visual artwork. The present disc takes the medium-crossing approach a step further, interspersing recited poetry with music by Robert de Visée, the king of the French lutenists, played here on theorbo. The linking themes are those of conversation and rhetoric, and the cover painting, reproduced in detail in the interior, is a fascinating depiction by Eustache Le Sueur (1616-1665) of the plans for a French monastery, hoisted aloft by two flying cherubs and discussed by two noblemen or scholars standing in the foreground. Theorbist Vincent Dumestre handles the ornamentation of the music with impressive smoothness, and the poetry, all of it by Théophile de Viau, will be unfamiliar to most listeners outside France. The centerpiece is a long (36-stanza, 360-line) work, written to the poet's brother, about the experience of being imprisoned in a dungeon after publishing some licentious poems and then being accused of atheism and blasphemy. The poetry is described in some detail, but it is not, presumably because of its length, translated into English, although the booklet notes themselves appear in both French and English; the album's usefulness for non-Francophones is thus limited. Those with some French, however, will get the gist of what the performers are trying to do. Mixtures of music and poetry have a certain baldly speculative quality -- to be perfectly authentic, you'd have to have dishes being cleared away and servants circulating with wine bottles. But the listener interested in the French court and the place music held there will come away with added food for thought after hearing this disc.

© TiVo