The Ensemble Diderot perform Meister's Il giardino del piacere

The Ensemble Diderot perform Meister's Il giardino del piacere

JS Bach isn’t the only musical jailbird to have served time thanks to the whim of a disgruntled aristocratic employer. Ending his days as organist of the Marienkirke in Flensburg, JF Meister had previously endured a similar fate.

Our rating

5

Published: June 13, 2017 at 2:31 pm

COMPOSERS: Meister LABELS: Audax Records ALBUM TITLE: Meister WORKS: Il giardino del piacere PERFORMER: Ensemble Diderot CATALOGUE NO: ADX 13705

JS Bach isn’t the only musical jailbird to have served time thanks to the whim of a disgruntled aristocratic employer. Ending his days as organist of the Marienkirke in Flensburg, JF Meister had previously endured a similar fate. He’s not a name much encountered these days, but six of the 12 trio sonatas assembled in his 1695 collection Il giardino del piacere constituted the recorded ‘last will and testament’ of much-missed Musica Antiqua Köln; just over a decade on, Ensemble Diderot corrals the remaining half dozen to complete the project.

The title nods to Reincken’s influential Hortus Musicus of 1687, and the suites follow no pre-ordained groundplan. There’s a pinch of Corelli here, a generous helping of Buxtehude there, while the French lace up their dance shoes to complete the polyglot seasoning. In places you might even be reminded of Purcell – particularly in the G minor Sonata whose dark dramas draw playing of deeply empathetic intensity from the Diderots – neatly counterbalanced by the debonair cut of the G major Sarabande’s jib and a beautifully delineated Passacaglia in the concluding E flat Sonata.

Enriched by Philippe Grisvard’s fluid harpsichord realisations, ravishingly recorded, this is classy, fulsome, engagingly urbane playing. And as befits an ensemble named after the French ‘philosophe’, pre-eminently thoughtful too.

Paul Riley

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