On Frère Jacques, subtitled Round About Offenbach, clarinettist Gianluigi Trovesi and accordionist Gianni Coscia turn to Jacques Offenbach. Born in Cologne in 1819, he wrote some of the most playful music of the nineteenth century. It is their third ECM album built around a kindred spirit, after Milanese composer Fiorenzo Carpi on In cerca di cibo and Kurt Weill on Round About Weill. Offenbach's music could be beautiful and highly satirical by turns, always meticulously crafted, and he cared little whether anyone took it for high art.
The two musicians have been friends since childhood, as Stereoplay recalled when reviewing their Weill album. This session was recorded in January and March 2009 at the Centro Civico Musicale Sant'Anna in Perugia, with Francesco Ciarfuglia engineering and Manfred Eicher producing. Trovesi plays piccolo and alto clarinets, Coscia the accordion. For the third time, the booklet carries an essay by Umberto Eco. In it he recalls a theme heard once on the radio, which he remains convinced was by Offenbach and has never managed to find again.
The nineteen tracks run to about 74 minutes. Themes come from La belle Hélène, La Périchole, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, La vie parisienne and Les contes d'Hoffmann. Often each is fused with a new piece by the duo inside a single track, as in Piff, paff, pouff / La Duchessa nei caraibi, while Sei italiano? / No... je suis Brésilien slides from an ungainly waltz into something seedier. Wholly original pieces such as Tangoffenbach and Dedicated to Hélène and her little birds sit between them, and the album ends with the Epilogue from Hoffmann. The humour lies in the details: at the end of the second track the clarinet stops on the seventh degree over the accordion's dominant chord, so the harmony never resolves.
Offenbach's standing was always ambiguous. Debussy called him a talented musician who hated music, while Karl Kraus admired the operettas enough to coin the word "Offenbachiaden" for them. Trovesi and Coscia treat that mix of craft and mockery as an invitation. Writing in PopMatters in 2012, John Garratt found that "their loving renditions of Offenbach's miniatures rise above mere professionalism". At Blogcritics in December 2011, Greg Barbrick called it "one of the finest records ECM released in 2011".
This is the CD edition, ECM 2217, released on 21 October 2011, with Eco's essay in the booklet in Italian, English and German.
