Lindsay Kemp reviewed our CD ‘Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre: chamber music from the Brossard Collection’ in Gramophone

The trios make up the most interesting part of the recording – robustly made music in which Jacquet de La Guerre shows her fertile melodic imagination and harmonic depth, packing it all in by casting the sonatas in sections linked by transitions rather than as discrete movements à la Corelli. It makes them less predictable and more able to surprise and delight. Her violin sonatas are more conventional but leave space for the continuo gamba to cut loose, and also include some of the earliest examples in French music of violin multiple-stopping.

The London-based Bach Players have been playing Jacquet de La Guerre for a while now – they included a different trio on their An Italian in Paris album – and their performances of the trios in particular are stylistically and musically assured, allowing this fine music the seriousness and room to breathe it needs. Some of the sonatas are prefaced by a harpsichord prelude, effectively provided by Silas Wollston.