Luigi Boccherini is one of the major figures of the Classical period and the composer of a staggering number of impressive, innovative, expressive, and highly original instrumental works, particularly of those in chamber combinations. Despite his "rediscovery" in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, Boccherini has never really merited a full-scale "revival" and the semiquincentennial of his birth passed in 1994 with hardly anyone seeming to notice. Thanks to increased public awareness of pieces like La musica Notturna delle Strade di Madrid and increased Boccherini programming on public radio, the situation is slowly improving. Boccherini's Opus 14 Trios are scored for violin, viola, and cello and date from 1772, constituting the first set of six of only two that Boccherini wrote for this unusual combination. They have seldom been recorded; the so-called New York String Trio (not to be confused with the String Trio of New York) first recorded Trios No. 4 and No. 5 for Dover in 1966, and the Trio Euterpe recorded some others for Arion in the 1970s. The first complete Opus 14 wasn't achieved until Trio Miró, a group hailing from Boccherini's hometown of Lucca, recorded the whole set for Christophorus in 1994. Around the same time, the group featured on Glossa's Boccherini en Boadilla,
La Real Cámara, finished its recording of Boccherini's later Opus 54 set of trios, scored for two violins and cello. We should be thankful that
La Real Cámara decided to return, more than a decade later, to address the earlier set, as Boccherini en Boadilla will come as a breath of fresh air even to those listeners conversant with La musica Notturna, the Fandango, and Boccherini's other moderately popular pieces.
Boadilla del Monte is a "historical suburb" of Madrid where the Palace of the Infante Don Luis de Bourbón is located; Boccherini lived in an apartment in the palace for six years, from 1769 to 1775. Another frequent visitor to the Infante's court, and therefore to Boadilla del Monte, was painter Francisco Goya, whose work handsomely illustrates seven of the nine panels that make up this CD case. The visuals provide a strong counterpoint to the music, which evokes its distant era with a surprising variety of rich ideas despite the rather limited chamber combination for which it is composed. This is deepened by
La Real Cámara's probing, intuitive interpretive understanding of Boccherini's score, exposing its light, shade, and color and getting to the meaning of the music. One of the most remarkable aspects of Glossa's Boccherini en Boadilla is how the expansiveness of approach employed by
La Real Cámara seems to imbue Boccherini's music with more emotional depth than is the perceived norm, and to render individual movements with an expanded sense of time that make these works longer than they actually are. Yet these performances are of almost exactly the same length established by the few other recordings that have been made of these trios, it's just that
La Real Cámara has located the heart of this music through its disciplined use of dynamics and its grasp of some of the more recondite aspects of eighteenth century chamber music.
In his time, the Trios, Op. 14, were a real boon to Boccherini's reputation; between 1773-1795, they were printed no less than five times. If Boccherini can continue to get recordings as good as Glossa's Boccherini en Boadilla, then he might be in line for that full-scale revival yet.