The premiss of this album is of course purely hypothetical, resting as it does on the fantasy that the oboist Hansjörg Schellenberger, his wife Margit-Anna Süss on her harp, and their colleague Klaus Stoll on the violone might have stopped off on their travels together to give a recital at the court of the French King Louis XIV, in one of the magnificent salons or reception rooms at the palace of Versailles, which on the monarch’s initiative had become the new centre of the “Hexagon” and the whole French empire.

Far-fetched though this fantasy may be, it is not entirely beyond imagining, since everything was thinkable in a realm on which the sun never set. Thus the music of the masters, who circled round its mighty centre in closer or more distant orbits, can create its own unique effect even if the instrumental group is a little different from the ensembles one normally imagines in and around Versailles. Be that as it may, the entertaining sections of Marin Marais’s virtuoso Variations on Les Folies d’Espagne and the arranged harpsichord works by Monsieur Rameau all offer great enjoyment even in their unaccustomed guises, since their essential substance survives, and, after all, as Ferruccio Busoni so appositely remarked, every musical notation “is already the transcription of an abstract concept”…

Tracklisting

Marin Marais
01 Les Folies d’Espagne

Jean Philippe Rameau
02 Musette en Rondeau
03 Rigaudon
04 Gigue
05 Les Sauvages
06 Tambourin
07 La Follette

Marin Marais
Suite en Ré mineur
08 Prélude
09 Allemande
10 La Mignone
11 Caprice
12 Menuet
13 Gigue La Petite
14 Rondeau

Michel-Richard Delalande
Symphonies des Noël
15 O ma voisine
16 Voicy le jour solemnel
17 Je me suis levé per un matinet
18 Joseph est bien marié
19 St. Prophete
20 Vous qui desirés sans fin
21 Notre bon père Noél
22 Noél pour l’amour de Marié
23 Les Bourgeoises de Chartres
24 Si c’est pour moter la vie
25 O Dieu que nétois je né
26 Une bergere jolie
27 Noél Nouveau 1733
28 Autre Noél

François Couperin
29 Les Barricades mysterieuses
30 Soeur Monique

François Couperin
Concerto VI in B-flat major
31 Gravement et mésuré
32 Allemende à 4 temps légers
33 Srabande
34 Air de diable
35 Sicilienne

Gesamtlänge 68:41

Künstler

Hansjörg Schellenberger, Oboe
Margit-Anna Süss, Harfe
Klaus Stoll, Kontrabass

Pressestimmen

☞ »Auch ein schönes Barockprogramm unter dem Titel ›Musique à Versailles‹ ist mit dabei. … Vorbildlich.« DIE WELT, 5.1.2001