La Muse et la Mise

This Flemish baroque ensemble was founded in 2011 by recorder player Patrick Denecker as the counterpart of his ensemble La Caccia for Renaissance music. The name of the Redherring ensemble (red herring) refers to a rhetorical technique to distract someone from the subject itself. Let that now be very appropriate for this new recording in which the attention is, as it were, derived from the pure harpsichord sound in the 17th and 18th-century suites of, among others, François Couperin and Charles Dieupart. The performers invoke the “mise en concert” practice in the 18th-century aristocratic salons: harpsichord music was transformed into ensemble pieces in a kind of gallant jam sessions, in which of course many more instrumental colors are dealt with. The first song a Musette by Couperin is immediately over: theorist Floris De Rycker and gambist Kaori Uemura provide a sonorous bourdon, the other instruments (violin, recorder, harpsichord) play the graceful melody in varying combinations. In all converted harpsichord pieces you get very beautiful and diverse instrument combinations.