It is a fascinating paradox that the French court, with all its external splendor, turned in its music partly to the most interior, inward of forms, chamber music for viols, intended for the darkened, quiet rooms so memorably depicted in the film
Tous les matins du monde
. Has there ever been, anywhere in the world, a collection of pieces like the viol music of
Marin Marais
, amounting to some 600 pieces in all? What does it mean culturally that this society created this music? It is questions like these that make bass viol player
Francois Joubert-Caillet
's gigantic effort to record the whole corpus worthwhile. His series of five multi-disc albums comes to an end with this 2023 release. To listen to the whole set would be a rare activity indeed, and even one of the volumes is a listening marathon. Yet that is the fascination here.
Joubert-Caillet
's set illuminates the variety
Marais
was able to achieve within an enormously restricted format. There is a fairly famous piece here, "
Le tableau de l'operation de la taille
" ("Representation of a Gall Bladder Operation"), complete with a spoken program, but even the ordinary pieces have some little detail of interest. Some have the names of French dances; some are character pieces whose referents can still sometimes be divined at this distance (in a few cases, both of these are true). There is no better way to immerse oneself in this odd world than with
's clean, sober playing and that of his small accompanying ensemble,
L'Acheron
. The only real objection here is the unidiomatic, noisy church sound; this was music made for small rooms, but true lovers of the French Baroque will find this, like
's other volumes, a collection cornerstone. ~ James Manheim