Laurence Pottier - Le Romain - Music & Performance - CD

Jacques Hotteterre, called le Romain, is one of the most illustrious figures in the history of the transverse flute. At the same time a distinguished performer, an enlightened teacher and a recognized composer, he brought to the Baroque flute full respectability through his Livres de pièces (Books of Pieces), L'Art de Prélude (The Art of the Prelude) and his Principes de la Flûte (principles of the Flute). There are various confusions relating to Jacques Hotteterre, to whom the invention of the three-section Baroque flute is of !en wrongly attributed, whereas he was only it's popularizer. The Rondeau: Les Tourterelles, gracieusement et un peu lent (Rondeau: The Turtle-Doves, gracefully and rather slow) is a piece in subdued shades. Hotteterre allows the feeling to open out. The rondeau structure is perfectly mastered and the use of portamento, slurs and harmonic delays gives the composition a languishing character that the title confirms. This piece ought to be played with unequal notes, making the dialogue still more tender. The Gigue, in the Italian style, as always with Hotteterre, brings equality between the two upper parts. Far from writing a second accompanying part, the composer has provided a second treble part of equal importance with the first. This ability demonstrates the composer's musical gifts to be developed in the final passacaglia. This last consists of 153 bars in two tonalities, B minor and B major, and is almost perfect in it's structure. Motifs of four and a half bars are always repeated twice, except in variations 5, 6 and 7. Variation 5 has nine bars, twice repeated; variation 6 has four and a half bars once, not repeated; variation 7 has sixteen bars, not repeated. It is in this kind of piece that the composer's imagination is given expression, since the repetitions can tire the listener if no new musical idea is occasionally introduced. In this passacaglia Hotteterre shows all his musical qualities: tenderness in the slurring and ornamentation or virtuosity in the short notes, lively ornaments and scales in semi-quavers. With L 'Art de preluder Hotteterre offers again a work that is more didactic than musical, Here the teacher returns and seems to want to protect his music, and, more generally, the music of his time, against the chance interpretations of the players of his own time or of later generations, It might be suggested that Hotteterre was in some ways reactionary. If Chapters III, N and VI are "models of preludes through which talent can begin to be formed", Chapter XI " Of different kinds of bars, with explanations of quavers etc..." explains exactly where every good musician should dot quavers, that is to say treat them as unequal notes. There is no need to say that this chapter cannot be ignored by any who want to perform as faithfully as possible French music of the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. Perhaps he was right to be on his guard, in view of some of the interpretations we hear today. Baroque music is not played as it is written; it is necessary to have the key to discover it's secrets and to give it it's full strength.