Fans of Marais’ music will want to compare Sophie Watillon’s new release with a string of other very strong, very colourful, recorded interpretations reviewed in these pages. Whether or not this performance or that best represents Marais’ way of playing is of course impossible to determine. Our taste is inevitably substantially informed by our times, in spite of all we can glean from original accounts of how he and his contemporaries played.

With this in mind, I have to confess that although I find Watillon’s performances solid and in most senses authoritative, they lack sufficient caractère. The Muzette, for example, is surprisingly understated. The gabbling Dialogue is taken too seriously and thereby deprived of its intended wit, a problem compounded in the Chaconne where the soberly drawn solo seems at odds with the rather jolly accompaniment.

Heard from another perspective, these are very private accounts – musique de chambre – scaled to small spaces and select audiences. The single work by Marais’s mentor, Sainte-Colombe, included here is, appropriately, delicately drawn (the only surprise is the reliance on the swelled enflé stroke usually associated with Marais’s later music). Even so, more should have been made of Marais’s masterfully graduated ornamentation and bowing effects in support of the rich harmonic progressions he devised, particularly in the Caprice, the Plainte and the Tombeau pour Mr de Sainte-Colombe.

In lieu of these notated resources, Watillon relies on slowing down the tempo to highlight passages, as in the hypnotic Prélude en harpèment, some of the Couplets de Folies, La Rêveuse and the Tombeau. I would also question the slow speed of her pincé (two-finger vibrato) in the Plainte and the Tombeau, which unhappily detracts from the sentiments Marais was seemingly trying to represent.

Her continuo players individually offer able support, although when they play together they threaten to overwhelm her. The Baroque guitar, a popular accompanying instrument for the Couplets de Folies, sounds almost too flamboyant in this pastel context. Caveat auditor.