Handel: Théâtre intime – Les Lunes du Cousin Jacques

Handel spent his apprenticeship years in the opera house, and he never really left it, not even when he sat down to write a sonata for a gentleman amateur to play after supper. That fact — obvious once stated, easy to forget in reading — is the whole premise of this new release from Les Lunes du Cousin Jacques, a young French ensemble with a nice line in wordplay for a name and, on the evidence here, real but uneven gifts.

The four recorder sonatas — in D minor, A minor, B-flat, and C major, HWV 367, 369, 377, and 365 — are old friends to anyone who grew up on the Dolmetsch and Brüggen recordings, or later the sleeker, more athletic accounts that followed once the early-music movement got its second wind. Handel wrote for the recorder the way he wrote for everything: generously, promiscuously, borrowing from himself without embarrassment. Movements migrate. An adagio here turns up transfigured as an organ concerto slow movement there. Scholars still argue about authenticity and scoring, and rightly so — Walsh and his fellow publishers were not above manufacturing a “Handel sonata” out of spare parts when the real thing wasn’t forthcoming fast enough to satisfy demand. These four, at least, stand on solid ground.

Benoît Toïgo plays them with a tone I’d call burnished rather than bright — woody, unforced, never squeezed for volume the way some recorder players resort to when they mistake projection for eloquence. His phrasing has an unhurried quality that I found immediately sympathetic. Too many performances of this repertoire these days go for broke on tempo, as though Handel were somehow in competition with Vivaldi for sheer velocity. Toïgo resists that temptation almost entirely, and the record is better for it. There is space to breathe here, air around the notes.

His ornamentation, too, shows imagination — genuine variety from movement to movement, not the stock formulas you sometimes hear trotted out by rote. But imagination unchecked becomes indulgence. The cadenza he inserts into the alla breve of the D minor sonata goes on rather longer than the material can bear; by the time he resolves it you’ve forgotten what key you were in, or at least I had. And here’s the paradox at the heart of this disc: for a program billed as “théâtre intime,” the actual drama is oddly muted. The furioso of that same D minor sonata wants some grit, some rhetorical snap — Handel learned his craft writing for Roman cardinals and London audiences who wanted to be seduced or startled, not soothed. Toïgo gives us elegance where the score is asking, at least occasionally, for a raised voice.

The vocal items are a mixed blessing. “Son d’Egitto” and “Non posso dir di più” are slight but charming rarities, welcome simply for existing on disc at all — this is not music you’ll find crowding your shelves. The real find is the chamber cantata usually known by its later title, “Nel dolce dell’oblio,” Handel’s sole essay in obbligato recorder-and-voice writing, originally called Pensieri notturni di Filli. (The booklet, oddly, mentions only the Italian title, which will send anyone who knows the piece by its familiar English-market name scrambling to confirm they’re listening to the right track.) It’s a gorgeous piece — hushed, nocturnal, the recorder curling around the voice like mist around a streetlamp — and it demands the kind of hooded, confiding tone that made singers like Emma Kirkby, in her prime, so ideal in this repertoire.

Aurore Bucher doesn’t quite find that voice. She sings with conviction and a real sense of theatrical shape, qualities that would serve her well in the actual opera house. But chamber cantata is a different animal — a whispered aside, not a proclamation — and she pushes too hard, too consistently, so that poor Toïgo’s recorder keeps vanishing under her sound. Balance problems, too, may be partly the engineers’ doing; the recorded perspective favors the voice more than the intimacy of the genre would suggest is wise.

The instrumental interludes — a harpsichord adagio from the F major suite, played with quiet poise by Frédéric Hernandez — offer welcome relief, small windows of repose between the vocal numbers. Diego Salamanca’s theorbo and Annabelle Brey’s cello provide continuo work that’s alert without being fussy, exactly what this repertoire wants and too rarely gets.

So: a disc of real virtues undone somewhat by its own ambitions. The playing is often lovely, sometimes over-egged; the singing is sincere but miscalibrated for the room, so to speak. Anyone assembling a Handel chamber collection will still want a Brüggen or a Petri for comparison, but Toïgo’s unhurried musicianship earns this disc a place on the shelf too — filed, perhaps, under promising rather than definitive.