Suites à deux violes

Description

Of all the composers at the French court, Marin Marais is without precedent. He thrilled the courts of the most powerful kings in 17th-century Europe and has remained an essential figure for three centuries. In 1689, and for the first time in France, Marais published a basso continuo part for his first book. This work is revolutionary! But Marais goes even further in his praise of the theorbo in his second book of Pièces de Viole (1701), where it leaves its role as a continuo instrument to rise to the rank of soloist. Sylvia Abramowicz’s viola da gamba is one of the few 17th-century French viols to have survived the hundreds of years that separate us from Marais. The strings used were made based on the recipe for a specific brass used by Marais and produce a softer sound than their modern counterparts, while also helping to highlight the beautiful and complex nuances frequently used in Marais’s music. In the same vein, A 2 Violes Esgales chose to play at a tuning of 409hz, which is closer to that used by Lully’s and Marais’s orchestra and gives the music a different texture and color. Jonathan Dunford met Sylvia Abramowicz thirty years ago in Jordi Savall’s class in Basel. They decided to come together to read Marais’s suites, and also for life. This recording, accompanied by their son Thomas, is the result of thirty years spent in the company of this emblematic work.