Now is this unusual or is this unusual? Teodorico Pedrini was an Italian organist sent by the Pope to Peking in 1701, in answer to a request from the Emperor of China for a European musician to join his service. Western music was seen as a useful way of proving the superiority of the Catholic religion, and had been an increasingly strong presence at the Imperial court ever since the first Italian musician, a Jesuit missionary, had arrived in Peking about 100 years earlier. Pedrini actually took ten years to reach China, mainly as a result of missing his boat and then being blown the wrong way round the world when he caught the next one, but once there he stayed until his death in 1746. His picture in the booklet accompanying this CD suggests a man who ‘went native’, but in fact the five sonatas for solo instrument and continuo served up here from his only surviving publication are Italian – more specifically Corellian – to the core. What makes this release special, however, is that each sonata is prefaced by a Divertissement chinois from a set compiled in the 1770s by the French Jesuit priest Joseph Marie Amiot. Apparently European musicians in China performed the local music as well, and Amiot’s pieces seem to be a collection of Chinese unaccompanied tunes put into Western notation for practical purposes.
The cumbersomely named XVIII-21, Musique des Lumieres, perform this exotic fare with some flair and plenty of imagination; although Pedrini’s sonatas were advertised as being for violin, two of the five divertissement-sonata pairs are played on the flute and one on cello, with each player demonstrating a strongly expressive approach both to the Italian music and to the Chinese. Patrick Bismuth is a violinist whose bold interpretations I have admired before (though his tone suffers a little from his rhetorical efforts), while Jean-Christophe Frisch’s flute-playing is hauntingly convincing in the Amiot, if less so in the Pedrini.
Overall, this is a fascinating, compelling and very probably unique release. I urge the curious-minded to try it out.'