French Baroque Music
Music by Leclair, Lalande, Couperin, Rameau
Jean-François Paillard
Erato 9029628784 — set of 14 CDs (26th November 2022)
review by Graham Rickson
I’m a little suspicious of orchestras named after their conductors, though it was recently pointed out to me that for every Geoff Love or Ray Conniff there’s often a John Wilson, or a Jean-François Paillard. Most of the remastered LPs in this intoxicating 14-CD box set of French baroque repertoire were recorded by the Orchestre de Chambre Jean-François Paillard, the name given in 1959 to an ensemble formed six years earlier as the Ensemble Instrumental Jean-Marie Leclair. Their 1953 disc of Charpentier’s Te Deum was hailed as “one of the glories of the French record industry” and effectively launched the Erato label. That performance isn’t included here, though discs 13 and 14 do contain a selection of items taped with the earlier group in decent mono sound.
Paillard was a genuine polymath, earning a maths degree from the Sorbonne before enrolling at the Paris Conservatoire as a musicologist. This set makes for fascinating listening, Paillard’s interpretations offering a snapshot of what constituted historically informed practice from the mid-1950s onwards. One of the earliest recordings here is a 1956 performance of a suite from Michel-Richard de Lalande’s wonderfully-named Symphonies pour les Soupers du Roy. Speeds are on the stately side but there’s never any feeling of heaviness, Paillard’s rhythms nicely-pointed. Lightness and colour are constants across these discs – compare that LP with a further selection of Lalande suites taped in the early 1980s and the style is recognisably the same.A lovely 1959 disc features some indecently rich-sounding orchestral Couperin, though you can’t imagine wanting to hear this music played differently. It’s the same with a 1962 album containing orchestral transcriptions of Rameau keyboard music. Try Paillard’s brilliantly vivid take on the familiar “La poule” – if you enjoy it, (and who wouldn't?), you’ll want the whole box.
There’s some familiar-ish repertoire from Lully, Rameau and Couperin, but much here is stuff you simply won’t find anywhere else. Gérard Jarry (Paillard’s long-serving principal violin) plays 11 concertos by Jean-Marie Leclair, finding something of interest in each one. If you’ve never encountered Dauvergne, Aubert, Naudot, Francœur or Dampierre, start here.
I kept returning to a 1967 album of wind and brass music “pour La Grande Écurie a Versailles” [not just “a great stable”, but a royal institution that included also musicians – most of the royal wind players were employed there], the massed trumpets, hunting horns and winds wonderfully unhomogenised. Paillard’s oboes and bassoons sound like bagpipes in Philidor’s little “La Marche des Dragons du Roy” [The March of the King's Dragoons] and a Parisian troupe of "trompes de chasse” will make your windows rattle.
Starry soloists include flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal and trumpeter Maurice André, and the great baritone Gérard Souzay sings a quartet of cantatas.
Unmissable, and a real bargain, the individual CDs with original sleeve art. Warners have also released a box set of Paillard’s vintage Bach recordings. Buy that too.
Originally published on theartsdesk.com on 28th January 2023.
Links
- Set on the website of Warner Classics/Erato.
- Set on the website of the British retailer Presto Music.