No one has surpassed Marais: only one has equalled him, and that is the famous Forqueray: with these words, in 1752, a contemporary praised one of the last great virtuosos of the viola da gamba. Known for his formidably difficult and technical musical style, Forqueray's world is nonetheless immensely rich: through the works of the father Antoine, his son Jean-Baptiste and his nephew Nicolas-Gilles, an august lineage emerges whose grace and genius never ceased to inspire. At times proud, even bellicose, at other times deeply tender, the viol pieces by this Forqueray family plunge us into a flight of expressions of passions whose vivacity is equalled only by their intensity. Myriam Rignol, as a distant granddaughter, accompanied by her exquisite Timbres, delivers in this complete work a powerful homage to these 18th-century chamber music icons who, in their image, could never be anything other than virtuoso.

Destined to be musicians? The female composers to whom Baroque violinist Sophie de Bardonneche pays tribute enjoyed very different fates: while the name elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665-1729) continued to be remembered, who knows Mlle Duval (born around 1718), the second woman to have a work presented at the Paris Opera and nicknamed 'la Legende' in her time? Her opera-ballet, Les Genies, remains a testament to her great mastery. Then there were Anne-Madeleine Guesdon de Presles and elisabeth-Louise Pellecier, composers married to composers - the latter signed her works with the name of her husband, Papavoine... Others found it easier to achieve the limelight because they were aristocrats, like Mlle de Menetou (1679-1745). No fewer than ten female composers are brought back to life in this programme of sonatas, overtures and dances devised by Sophie de Bardonneche, a founder member of Le Consort, who is accompanied on her first solo album by her partners Lucile Boulanger and Justin Taylor.

After the immense success of her Bach-Abel album (ALPHA783), Lucile Boulanger celebrates the French viol through the centuries: 'This transchronological dialogue traces the history of a dynasty of composers in a subjective, even emotional way', from the seventeenth century (Marin Marais, Sainte-Colombe, Nicolas Hotman) to the twenty-first, with contemporary works by Philippe Hersant, Claire-Melanie Sinnhuber and Gerard Pesson, some of which were specifically written for Lucile Boulanger: 'There is no longer any need to prove that my instrument is an integral part of our musical landscape. The viol is alive and well. For several decades now, it has inspired new compositions; it's vocabulary is constantly expanding', concludes the violist.

We are around the time of the Regency, at the political crossroads between Louis XIV and Louis XV. The viola da gamba was enjoying its last hours of glory in France, while the violin was beginning to take centre stage. The Golden Hour, which generally refers to the periods after sunrise and before sunset when the light changes, evokes here those years of convergence, even confrontation, between a viola da gamba in the twilight of its life and a violin at the dawn of its soloist destiny.

‘London, April 1604. With the freshly printed partbooks of his Lachrimae under his arm, John Dowland walks from the printing house to his home in Fetter Lane. He should have been back in Denmark long ago, but for the moment all his thoughts are on the new publication he is carrying, his latest and most ambitious work to date: a complete cycle of instrumental music, twenty-one dances, honourably dedicated to Anne of Denmark, Queen of England.’ For Dowland has just completed one of the greatest masterpieces of Renaissance music. He had left England to enter the service of the Danish court, disappointed at not being appointed court composer to Elizabeth I, but he seems to have made the best of all his setbacks to compose this magnificent collection of purely instrumental works, much of it bathed in the melancholy typical of late sixteenth-century England.

Musicall Humors – a collective of the finest gambists of their generation – performs the complete set of pavans, galliards and ‘almands’, grouped into suites, each with its own character. A character inspired by the music, but reinforced here by the changing composition of the consort and the players taking turns to perform the ‘top line’, so that each musician’s personal playing style gives each piece a specific colour.

REVIEWS:

Dunford immerses the five-person gamba ensemble led by Julien Léonard and Lucile Boulanger in a rich and often extremely fragile-seeming web of voices and moods with a composure and sovereignty that moves and inspires. Everything breathes in the most wonderfully sonorous interplay, nothing groaning excessively. And when they dance, they maintain their posture and dignity like a dream.

-- ConcertoNet

We are faced with an absolutely referential recording, of intense and unprecedented beauty. Musicall Humors offers us the complete collection, but in a sequence of pavans followed by galliards, which refreshes our ears with the contrast, compared to the usual arrangement.

-- Scherzo

 

This is Lucile Boulanger’s first solo recital. The French gambist, universally praised for her natural and moving playing – BBC Music Magazine even described her as ‘the Jacqueline du Pré of the viola da gamba’ – juxtaposes Bach with Carl Friedrich Abel, a great master of the bass viol and a close friend of the Bach family. Although Johann Sebastian never wrote for solo viola da gamba, we know that he transcribed many of his works for other instruments. So Lucile Boulanger has chosen, for example, to transcribe three dances from the Sixth Suite, ‘because it sounds particularly good on the viol, being written for five-stringed cello (a step towards the six or seven strings of the viol?). It is in D, the viol key par excellence, and its style, already somewhat galant, is reminiscent of Abel… This album gives me the opportunity to showcase the viol as both a melodic instrument – with the grain of the bow, the fragility of tone – and a polyphonic one.’