La Rêveuse: London, circa 1750

The Strad Issue: November 2025

Description: Baroque salon music at its most alluring

Musicians: La Rêveuse/Florence Bolton (viola da gamba)

Works: Abel: Concerto a Viola da Gamba Concertata; Quartet in G; 27 Pieces for Bass Viol: nos.24 and 26. Bach: Quartet op.8 no.2. Erskine: Trio Sonata no.6. Ford: Instructions for Playing on the Musical Glasses. Geminiani: Pieces for English guitar. Straube: Largo

Catalogue number: HARMONIA MUNDI HMM905380

This low-impact, high-finish album invites us to relax in a late-Baroque London salon for an evening’s gentle entertainment. The cosmopolitan nature of the names involved underlines what an artistic honeypot the English capital was at the time, to a degree only recovered two centuries later.

The tenor of the album is set by Florence Bolton’s soft-grained gamba in a modern reconstruction of a concerto by Abel, the celebrity gambist of 1760s London.

Modern recording allows such pieces to shine in a way almost impossible in our larger concert halls, and the recorded balance doesn’t put pressure on Bolton to equate virtuosity with volume; her colleagues weave around her as courtiers to a queen.

More ephemerally charming still are the two movements of a G major Quartet, in which flute and violin assert musical parity with Abel’s gamba.

At around 90 seconds each, two little pieces for ‘English guitar’ by Geminiani reveal more expressive variety than Abel’s pieces in their entirety – but then two excerpts from set of 27 serve to illustrate what an artist Abel himself must have been, captivating his audiences with long-breathed soliloquies worthy of his Shakespearean contemporary David Garrick.

The curtain closes on a note of distant enchantment, with a pair of 1761 pieces by Ann Ford for glass harmonica, flute and guitar – the last of several delightful discoveries.

PETER QUANTRILL