The eighteenth century
was hardly short of swashbucklers but
Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-George,
virtuoso fiddler, composer, swordsman,
and son of a French planter and a Senegalese
slave, was not low down on the list
of notables of his age. His picaresque
journeyings are novelistic in their
breadth – Revolution fleeing, association
with the Duc d’Orleans, exhibition fencing
in London and Brighton, captain of the
National Guard – and even Rousseau would
have had a hard time prophesying Boulogne’s
fusion of the musical with the military.
Nevertheless amidst
the carnage of late eighteenth century
France, and beyond its borders, Boulogne
still found time to compose for his
own instrument. The first volume of
Naxos’ series [not reviewed]
has given a foretaste of his abilities
as a composer and the second gives us
three more concertos. Naxos’ booklet
writer pitches them high and they are
certainly idiomatically written and
requiring of some pretty adept technique,
not least in the higher positions, in
which Boulogne was clearly an adept
practitioner. He was clearly no slouch
either when it came to brisk string
crossing because the scores bristle
with these and suchlike demands. He
strikes the most impressive note however
in slow movements; in the scena-like
Adagio of the D major (Op posthumous),
say, which is adroitly and unceasingly
lyric in impulse and in the dainty and
pliant Rondo finales of which he proves
a mini-master in these works. That of
the posthumously published D major is
especially winning and the modified
sonata form Presto finale of the G major
sparkles with Mozartian brio. A weakness
lies in the occasionally rather generic
Allegro first movements – always laid
out with skill but seldom with inspiration
(though I’d make an exception for the
inventive G major with its fine cadenza).
The Toronto Camerata
under its energetic Irish conductor
Kevin Mallon is doing some fine work
for Naxos. Soloist Qian Zhou plays with
a degree of dash but she sounds taxed
by some of Boulogne’s demands – she’s
splendid high up the fingerboard but
her string crossing isn’t quite there
and her intonation is sometimes suspect.
It sounds to me as if she is slightly
too near the microphones as well – we
can hear her changes of bow and this
accentuates a certain metallic astringency
in her tone. It doesn’t seriously affect
recommendation because Zhou sounds fully
committed to the repertoire. I suppose
the constituency for the disc is Violin
School of Mozart but the dramatic Boulogne
will certainly appeal to more broad-minded
violin fanciers and to those interested
in later eighteenth century Parisian
composition as well.
Jonathan Woolf
Toronto Camerata/Kevin Mallon 