The music of eighteenth century French composer Joseph Bodin de Boismortier has been undergoing a revival as the old notion of classical music as a tempo of high culture recedes into the past; Boismortier had a bad reputation, from his own time nearly until ours, because he was one of the first composers to make a good living from commercial success, outside the system of noble patronage. He was extremely prolific, and much of his music, even in larger forms, falls into short little chunks that are easy on the ears. Another common feature of Boismortier's music, along with that of several of his French contemporaries, was that he often wrote music of indeterminate instrumentation, the better to sell it to players of different instruments when it was published. In this delightful disc featuring hitherto-unrecorded music by Boismortier, the Belgian ensemble La Cetra d'Orfeo and its director/recorder virtuoso
Michel Keustermans exploit this latter characteristic of Boismortier's music to the hilt.
In the opening Les voyages de l'amour (The Voyages of Love), the group extracts a suite of one- or two-minute dances from a larger ballet. The work introduces the whole ensemble, which includes recorders, oboes, strings, a bassoon, a contrabass, a hurdy-gurdy, and a musette (a small French set of bagpipes). Smaller groups of instruments are split off for delightful pictorial movements like "Canaries" (track 9). Then the rest of the disc is given over to Boismortier's characteristic chamber music, most of it with titles like Sonata in four parts, equally elaborated (tracks 12-15) or Sonata for one high and two bass instruments (tracks 24-26). Boismortier's music is not profound, but it is consistently full of surprises. The Sonata in four parts, equally elaborated, in E minor, Op. 34, No. 3 skillfully evokes learned counterpoint without ever getting too complex. In the Suite No. 3 for harpsichord, Op. 59, Boismortier apes the language of Couperin but waters it down -- he does not attempt Couperin's profound feats of personality delineation, but his representation of a flea ("La puce, pièce en rondeau," track 21) is irresistible. When he does write for a specific instrument, as in the Sonata Quinta in G minor for cello and continuo, Op. 26/5, he has a strong instinct for colorful and idiomatic material. The presence of the hurdy-gurdy and musette, both suggested options on the part of the composer himself, is matched by short drone passages evocative of the rural settings in which these instruments would have been used. In the Concerto in G major, Op. 21/3, La Cetra d'Orfeo constructs a kaleidoscopic three-part solo group with musette, hurdy-gurdy, and recorder -- not, perhaps, something Boismortier would have done, but a real pleasure for the ear. The liner notes introduce the unique issues involved with performing Boismortier, and all in all it would be hard to imagine a better introduction to this French composer and his unfailingly attractive music.