JM Leclair - First complete recording of 4th (...)

No complete version of the twelve sonatas of the fourth book has ever been recorded. Patrick Bismuth and his ensemble La Tempesta bring exemplary musical vision to this work. Most stupefying acrobatics violin of Jean-Marie Leclair’s work put foward Patrick Bismuth’s personnality.

Today, Patrick Bismuth has set out to tackle a highly ambitious project - to record the fourth book of sonatas of Jean-Marie Leclair, generally considered the founder of the French violin school and compared by some commentators to J. S. Bach. Marc Pincherle emphasised that Leclair completed the process of ‘raising the French school to the level of the Italian’, and that his output of chamber music, long neglected, is ‘in quality and scale, quite new in France’.

„This set undoubtedly represents the apotheosis of the skills of both violinist and composer, it also belongs to a continuing process of development defended by Leclair himself, constituting as it does the final panel in a quadriptych that synthesises the very art of the French violin school. For each of the present sonatas (unlike the earlier books, more disparate in this respect), Leclair restricted himself to an overall layout of the sonata da chiesa type used by Corelli, in four movements following the scheme slow-fast-slow-fast (with the sole exception of the sixth sonata, which is in three sections). While generally respecting traditional bipartite form, Leclair often departed not only from the patterns of dances and choreographic models, but also from the classical and regular, almost learned developments which were widely practised in France until his time. Rich harmonies shot through with tonal hesitations or rapid, subtle modulations expand over streamlined bass lines, more galant and functional than before, which give the violin free rein for its outpourings in highly idiomatic lines, decked out in the most stupefying acrobatics.“Thomas Lecomte