After their revelatory recording of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Les Siècles and François-Xavier Roth give us the exotic Mother Goose suite and Le tombeau de Couperin which sound so new thanks to this period-instrument guise (light on vibrato, and with instruments appropriate to the time of composition). Ma Mére l’Oye, with its unique colours, benefits most from this approach, less sweet than normal and always strikingly original. Le tombeau…, a work tinged with sadness, really does seem to reach back into the depths of French music, evoking a past age to remember the composer’s friends lost to the First World War.



REVIEW:

This release has all the exemplary qualities we've come to expect from Roth and his orchestra: a painstaking reconstruction of period sound, interpretations of considerable cogency and subtlety, and playing of scrupulous precision and virtuosity.

– Gramophone