This Jean-Marie Leclair (there were a couple of them) lived from 1697 to 1764 and was a renowned Parisian composer-violinist considered the founder of French violin playing. When publishing took off in France, however, it was all about the Benjamins (or the Louies), and he cheerfully kept many of his violin works within the range playable on a flute and promoted them as playable on either instrument. He also wrote a modest number of works for the flute itself. They are collected in their entirety on this two-disc set, and while some of them could go in the reverse direction and be played on the violin, a few are idiomatic and specific to the flute. Most intriguing is the Deuxième récréation de musique in G minor for two flutes and continuo, Op. 8; its big chaconne, track 21, has an effect quite different from those in the violin tradition. Rather than the tense display of sheer athletic power one hears in violin chaconnes, Leclair instead breaks up the texture, pushing the music out of shape as far as he can while still keeping to the chaconne bass line. Aside from that work, most of the music is for flute and continuo, here realized on a cello and a harpsichord. The music is elegant, sunny, and rather circumspect, mostly consisting of four-movement sonatas made up of dance movements or Italian-style Allegros and Adagios. Nothing, except boxy sound, is really wrong with this performance by Baroque flutist
Fenwick Smith and a group of New England chamber performers, but this is something like a Naxos release from the label's early days -- it's indifferently recorded, and there's not really a compelling justification for plowing through two discs' worth of these sonatas. They get monotonous after a while, and the performers, though competent, don't bring a great deal of variety to them. The works recorded here aren't well known, and the set will fill the needs of flutists and serious Baroque scholars.