Making their début with this recording‚ the members of the Assemblée des Honnestes Curieux live up to their name in their wide­eyed exploration of the origins and influences on Marin Marais and Jean­Féry Rebel in these sonatas and suites. However‚ in the accompanying booklet Antoine Torunczyk and Gaëtan Naulleau take insufficient account of the single most powerful influence on these musicians: the operas of Lully. Marais was Lully’s assistant and later batteur de mesure at the Opéra while Rebel led the orchestra in perpetual Lully revivals. Yes‚ they must have been fascinated by the Italian instrumental music arriving in Paris in the late 1680s and the ’90s‚ but it was the musical settings of Quinault‚ inspired by Racine‚ that coursed through their brains. Not surprisingly‚ then‚ the Assemblée underestimate the rhetorical language that informs this music. In order to offer them to the public in 1692‚ Marais must have completed his trios by the beginning of the 1690s‚ well before Couperin composed his experimental ‘sonades’. Like the reduced opera scores of Lully‚ the trios are exquisitely minimalist to the eye‚ yet when performed reveal a surprisingly riveting dramatic soundscape. The gestures‚ representing a wide range of emotion‚ are there to be realised with wider experience of the music that formed Marais’ and even the younger Rebel’s musical taste. When Marais later attempted a sonata (tracks 18­23)‚ it was a failure‚ perhaps because he lacked sufficient sympathy – not to say inspiration – for the genre. The Assemblée seem to have adopted a mainstream Baroque instrumental style of playing‚ more appropriate to Vivaldi and Telemann than to Marais and Rebel. That is not to say that Frenchness is lacking‚ but certainly it is muted. Their style is too sustained: where in the Passacaille ‘La désolée’‚ for example‚ is the evocative enflé (swell) in the middle of long notes and why aren’t they allowed to decay as they end? There is energy but no rhythmic or harmonic tension‚ musical phrasing but not enough time for breathing. In French ensemble music of this period‚ the viol player needs to be particularly attentive to imitating the articulation of the upper instruments and to lending due impetus and weight to the illumination of the drama inherent in the harmonic progressions (as for example in the Grave of Rebel’s sonata). Their ensemble – a mixture of indoor and outdoor woodwind and string instruments – goes against French conventions of the time which called for two like instruments in a trio to be contrasted with another trio made of up other like instruments (two oboes and bassoon contrasted with two violins and basse de violon or two flutes and viol). As a result of mixing two timbres in one trio ensemble‚ Marais’ textures sound unnecessarily busy. Problems of balance in the recording mean that the combined sound of the oboe and the violin – exquisite in itself – is too bright for the more softly miked continuo instruments and compromises the passages in the sonatas where the viol acts as an equal partner to the violin. Sadly‚ the lovely harpsichord accompaniments provided by Chiao­Pin Kuo are almost lost in the background. I look forward to hearing the Assemblée des Honnestes Curieux in other repertories.