Dr. Palmer presents her own arrangements and transcriptions of French music spanning the early baroque period to the early classical period. She performs on a modern wood flute, an instrument that crosses the divide between a baroque flute and a modern orchestral flute. With the combination of a wood body and a silver mechanism, it has the tone qualities of a baroque flute, but with the stable pitch, mechanical improvements, and powerful delivery of a modern flute. Already the author of a book on eighteenth-century ornamentation, Palmer demonstrates her knowledge of the unique French style of musical performance that we now associate with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, first with four Airs de cour by Jean-Baptiste de Bousset, Bénigne de Bacilly, Michel Lambert, and Antoine Boësset. With their freestyle expressions of love and tender emotions, the Airs de cour were the most popular secular vocal music in France at the time. Marin Marais' compositions, including Les Folies d'Espagne, epitomize the essence of the French baroque style: grandeur without ostentation, virtuosity without vanity, and sensitivity without exaggeration. In her performance, Palmer improvises simple one- and two-note ornaments (agréments), a practice that was common in early eighteenth-century French music. The music of Louis-Gabriel Guillemain abounds in dramatic, almost schizophrenic exuberance, and his Opus 18 Caprices make virtuoso demands on the violinist. On the flutist these demands prove even more challenging being written in the idiom of another instrument. Dr. Palmer has composed her own cadenzas in her transcriptions of Guillemain's Caprices Number 11 and 8, Opus 18.
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