Performer: Simone Vallerotonda
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Arcana
Catalogue: A496
Release: 2022
Size: 842 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
01. Mouton: Prélude
02. Mouton: La belle Espagnole: Chaconne
03. Visée: Tombeau Mazarin: Allemande
04. Mouton: La belle Florentine: Sarabande
05. Mouton: La mélancolique: Courante de Gaultier
06. Mouton: La volage: Passacaille
07. Gallot: La comete: Chaconne
08. Fils: Rondeau
09. Rameau: Air pour les Esclaves africains
10. Pinel: L’enchantement
11. Visée: Courante
12. Visée: Prélude
13. Visée: Allemande
14. Pére: Courante
15. Gallot: L’altesse royale
16. Rameau: Les tendres plaintes: Rondeau
17. Strobel: Canaries ou gigue
18. Visée: La muzette: Rondeau
19. Visée: Tombeau du vieux Gallot: Allemande
20. Gallot: La cicogne: Courante
21. Gallot: Les castagnettes: Canaries
22. Mouton: My Mistress is Pretty: Branle de Mantoue
23. Couperin: Les baricades mistérieuses (from Pièces de clavecin II: Ordre 6ème in B flat)
On his second solo album for Arcana after “L’ Ultimo romano”, Simone Vallerotonda explores the metaphysical and sensual world of seventeenth-century French lute music. The result is “Méditation” : four suites in four different keys, each associated with a season and with one of the four ‘humours’ (melancholic/autumn, sanguine/spring, phlegmatic/winter, choleric/summer) that were said to characterise human beings in their temperament and physical traits.
An anatomy of the human soul, passing from the rarefied and reflective atmosphere of Charles Mouton’s Prélude non mesuré through Jacques Gallot’s dizzying Rondeaux, Valentin Strobel’s skipping, exotic Canaries, the eulogies of Robert de Visée’s Tombeaux, where the notes resonate like prayers and tears for the deceased, to the bizarre, asymmetrical Courantes of Dubut le Père. A journey at the conclusion of which we find human beings described in their different and contrasting passions by means of music – music whose colours, though centuries old, portray them with extraordinary modernity.