French—or Frenchified, in the case of Telemann's Paris Quartet—music of the second quarter of the eighteenth century often (as in this recording) deceives players into thinking that a mainstream 'baroque' interpretation will suffice. The fact is that this music, to varying degrees, is cast in a lingua franca more subtle than ever before, presupposing a fusion of the earlier French classic style, epitomized by its dance rhythms and rhetorical gestures, with that of the post-Corelli Italian style of violin playing. It is almost as if the composers expected the antecedents to form an allusive, or illusionary, backdrop for the music; thus, while they employed modern harmonic language and Italianate melodic structures, they continued to cast their music in such seemingly outmoded forms as court dances, character pieces, French overtures and chaconnes.
Music's Recreation, for all their evident technical skill, do not interpret the music from a French point of view. In the Rameau suite they have rather high-handedly orchestrated Rameau's carefully poised textures, alternating flute and violin within movements and even doubling up, which only succeeds in ruining the sense that these are accompanied harpsichord pieces. The ensemble's tempos reveal no awareness of the original character of the dances, their rhetoric is tedious and lacklustre (dare I say Germanic?) in its emphasis on the downbeat. They consistently put tone before metrical and melodic articulation, swamping such marvellous movements as Rameau's ''La Livri'', Telemann's Affettuoso and Leclair's Sarabande. Over and over again moments of melodic nuance—particularly in the flute and violin parts—are left unshaped and deprived of grace; nothing is made of the exquisite chromatic inflections in Leclair's Chaconne, which also suffers from lack of momentum (evident elsewhere).'