Jean-Marie Leclair: Violin Concertos – Fabio Biondi

   in Early Music Today (Sep, 2017)
The French composer Jean-Marie Leclair wrote 12 violin concertos in total, six in each of two collections published in 1737 and 1745. Fabio Biondi and the eleven musicians of Europa Galante, the orchestra he founded, perform four from the first of these, Leclair’s Op.7. In their music, Biondi and friends summon the refined manners, graceful, light-hearted gestures, rococo freshness, even in a sense the lacy embroidery and heady perfume of Louis XV’s decadent 18th-century Parisian court.

They open with the C major concerto, third in the album and the best known as it also occurs in the flute and oboe solo repertoire. It features a clean-cut, unfussy theme, which beams warmly …