SIEUR DE SAINTE-COLOMBE
Concerts à deux violes esgales

Jordi Savall

Alia Vox Heritage

15,99


Reference: AVSA9885

  • Wieland Kuijken
  • Jordi Savall

Nothing or next to nothing was known about Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe – not even his first name – and the mystery surrounding his person only intensified the mystery of his music: the Concerts à deux violes, which are the only pieces that have come down to us. He was known to violists as the inventor of the seventh string that was added to the bass viol of the Baroque era in France. It was gathered that he had two daughters because he was known to have given concerts with them. And Titon du Tillet had recounted the pleasing story of Marin Marais coming to listen to his master in secret, hidden under the hut in a mulberry tree where the latter “played the viol more peacefully and more delectably”.


THE DOUBLE LIFE OF MONSIEUR DE SAINTE COLOMBE

Nothing or next to nothing was known about Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe – not even his first name – and the mystery surrounding his person only intensified the mystery of his music: the Concerts à deux violes, which are the only pieces that have come down to us. He was known to violists as the inventor of the seventh string that was added to the bass viol of the Baroque era in France. It was gathered that he had two daughters because he was known to have given concerts with them. And Titon du Tillet had recounted the pleasing story of Marin Marais coming to listen to his master in secret, hidden under the hut in a mulberry tree where the latter “played the viol more peacefully and more delectably”. That was all. And on top of this mixture of ignorance and charming anecdotes, there was also his music – strange, somehow distant and aloof, grave and erudite, unlike any other known genre, impossible to relate either to a particular school or a specific type of composition, pitchforked into the history of music.

It was then that a writer and a film director – a producer of words and a producer of pictures – came on the scene: suddenly, a novel and a film put faces to Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe and his daughters, built the hut and filled it “delectably” with music. Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe had an identity, and what was most astonishing was that his personality in the film was not so much the result of the two well-known anecdotes (his daughters, the hut) as of his music itself. Its gravity became an expression of the seclusion, the reserve and the brusqueness of a man who had withdrawn into himself and was engrossed in transforming into sound all his nostalgia, despondency and unfulfilled desires. If was a biography stemming from the music: Les Regrets, Les Pleurs, La Rêveuse had given rise to a tragedy; its images and words were born from the eloquence without words of the music itself.

+ information in the CD booklet

PHILIPPE BEAUSSANT
Translated by Marie Pardoe

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