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Boreades:
Salons and gardens

Suites et sonates “pour les flûtes et les violons”

At the end of Louis XIV’s long reign, young nobles and well-off bourgeois gathered in the salons of Paris, far from the fusty court, to enjoy new and refined music, the fruit of the encounter between the witty French style and the completely new Italian genres of the sonata and the cantata. It was the beginning of the 18th century, and composers were striving to unite the two national styles into what François Couperin called “the perfect music.” In their chamber music on can recognize the same spirit that animates the figures disporting themselves in the enchanted gardens of Watteau’s fête galante paintings.