Luogo e data di registrazione		Doopsgezinde Kerk, Haarlem (Holland) - Aprile & Maggio 1976 * Lutherse Kerk, Haarlem (Holland) - Gennaio 1977
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Recording Supervisor		Wolf Erichson
	Recording Engineer		Dieter Thomsen
	Prima Edizione LP		Seon (Philips) | 6776 002 | 3 LPs - durata 50' 51" - 46' 08" - 36' 44" | (p) 1977 | ANA Seon (RCA Red Seal) | RL 30425 | 3 LPs - durata 50' 51" - 46' 08" - 36' 44" | (p) 1980 | ANA
	Edizione CD		Sony | SB2K 62942 | 2 CDs - durata 69' 28" & 66' 27" | (c) 1997 | ADD
	Original Cover		Jacques Hotteterre le Romain, nach einem kupferstich von Bernard Picart (1673-1733), Bibliothüque Nationale, Paris
	Note		-

All lovers of the flute owe a debt of gratitude to Jacques-Martin Hotteterre (1674-1763), who unquestionably did more than any other player, composer or instrument maker to launch the transverse flute as a viable alternative to the traditional recorder. Hotteterre not only wrote the first instruction method for modern flute ever published (1707), but vvas also, it seems, the High Baroque era's first serious composer for the instrument. Born into a family of instrument makers in the provincial French countryside, Hotteterre apparently spent a good deal of his early adulthood studying music in Italy, for he was popularly known as "the Roman Hotteterre." His first professional position in France, around 1705, was as a bassoonist, and a few years later he became a flûte de la chambre du roi (flutist for the king's chamber orchestra) at the court of Louis XIV. He soon began issuing flute suites, suite-sonatas, trio sonatas and duets that vastly extended the instrument's range and expression. Also active as a flute teacher to the nobility, he maintained a busy workshop in which he manufactured woodwinds of all types, many of them extravagantly decorated for aristocratic amateurs. A German visiting Paris in 1715, one Herr von Uffenbach, described a visit to Hotteterre’s instrument-making atelier: ”M. Hotteterre... took me to a gleaming chamber and there showed me sundry beautiful side-blown flutes.... He went on to show me another special instrument which he himself had improved, a musette, or kind of bagpipe, which may be tuned to every key, and which, happily, is now in fashion here.... Together with another musician at the keyboard he played a sonata so incomparably smooth and pleasant, and with such well-chosen embellishments, that I couldn't hear and admire him enough." The present “biography in sound” aims at representing Hotteterre’s finest work for a variety of woodwinds. Two of the instruments heard here, a musette and an oboe, were made by Hotteterre himself; the others are copies of French instruments from the early eighteenth century. The program begins with the sound of the musette - whose rustic strains, familiar to Hotteterre during his childhood, still seem discernible behind his courtly music for flute, recorder and oboe. Hotteterre is perhaps at his best in exploiting those plaintive, sighing, languishing qualities of the flute that writers of his day singled out for comment. Two examples are the “dolorous" Sarabande of the E-minor Suite (with its dissonant harmonies and expressive ornaments) and the poignant Grave of the C-major Trio Sonata (marked by sighing rests, syncopations and chromatic bass). More animated are the robust Gigue of the C-major Suite-Sonata, vvith its "hunting" motives, the lively contrapuntal sophistication of the E-minor Suite's Prélude, and the scintillating bursts of notes found in parts of L’Art de préluder. Even in movements derived closely from contemporary dance forms, Hotteterre often displays a noteworthy originality, as in the Musette of the G-major Duet Suite (which has a minuet for a trio section), or in his increasingly elaborate ornamentation of the same suite's Sarabande. Hotteterre’s works are also important in being among the first in France to include elements of the Italian style. His Suite-Sonatas of 1715 were, in fact, the first sonatas for a melody instrument and basso continuo to be published in France, mixed in style though they still are. Particularly Italianate are his leaps and arpeggios, most obviously in the Fugue of his D-minor Trio Sonata or the Prélude to the same work, but also in such otherwise typically French dances as the D- major Suite's Allemande. Most significantly Italian, perhaps, is the independence of Hotteterre’s bass lines, especially in the Allemande of the E-minor Suite. Jay M. Balenkof These notes are based on those by David Lasocki and Frans Brüggen which accompanied the original 1977 release.