![]() ![]() Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, longtime colleagues and friends, have played Beethoven’s five sonatas for cello and piano for some four decades, and won Grammy Awards for recordings of them in the 1980s. From the opening Adagio, passionate yet poised, to the ideally spirited Allegro finale, that sonata is a particular highlight of an intimate, stylish album. Whatever the tempo, a quintessentially French danciness is paramount, an elegant playfulness that breathes even through Italianate harmonic wanderings: The back end of the Gavotte in Senaillé’s Sonata in D here gets fascinatingly dusky. That restraint makes this truly a showcase for Langlois de Swarte, whose sweet, rich sound in these sonatas can be assertive, almost rustic, in fast movements and silky in slow ones, with a tasteful hint of wiry ping. But this recording of sonatas by Senaillé and the slightly younger Jean-Marie Leclair boasts the most celebrated partner: the Baroque eminence William Christie, who founded the ensemble Les Arts Florissants and joins on harpsichord with graceful restraint. This is Langlois de Swarte’s third release in the past year, following a duo disc with the exuberant lutenist Thomas Dunford and a recital of piano-violin music played in Proust’s Paris. This dashing album has been my introduction to the composer Jean-Baptiste Senaillé - well loved by the French aristocracy in the early 18th century, but now an obscurity - as well as to the young violinist Théotime Langlois de Swarte. ![]()
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