Ensemble Caprice - Sweet Follia (1999)

This experimental disc seems to be the brainchild of the Belgian-Québécois recorder virtuoso Matthias Maute, who wrote the notes and composed most of the new music contained herein. The album is noteworthy for not sounding like anything else ever recorded, but it has a bit too many things going on. Maute proposes a "dialogue entre l'Europe et l'Amérique" -- a dialogue between Europe and the Americas, and his program consists of Baroque and Renaissance European works for two recorders along with newly composed material drawing on North American styles. Maute seems to have started out with the common idea that Baroque music shares a common spirit with jazz -- an idea that becomes less and less appealing as one examines it more closely and realizes the ways in which jazz is fundamentally underpinned by an African aesthetic. His duo-recorder jazz-inflected works like the three-part suite It's Summertime and Bixler Beat seem like uncomfortable mixtures of discordant elements. But Maute broadens his idea beyond the Baroque-jazz equation to the expansion of the recorder duo's traditional role in teaching music, and here he is very successful. He reaches back to a few Renaissance works such as Thomas Morley's La Girondola, and proceeds through Baroque pieces (Purcell's Chaconne for two flutes on a ground) to works of his own composition that extend Baroque and Renaissance languages in the direction of considerable virtuosity. Hear his disc-opening La petite étude, and you just may be snared for the rest of the disc. His neo-Baroque Sonate en trio (Trio Sonata, tracks 18-21) is likewise a lot of fun, and he and recorder player Sophie Larivière execute everything cleanly and elegantly. Also of interest is How I Love You, Sweet Follia (there is no text), based on the "La Follia" pattern that served as a basis for numerous Baroque pieces including a towering Corelli variation set. This disc is one of those that does not accomplish everything it sets out to do, but wanders into new and interesting avenues along the way.