Musique à Versailles

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”…