CD, стоящие на полке рядом : Classics (Reconstruction)      

Hesperion XX

Recording Date and Place: in June and September 1996 en la Colegiata del Castillo de Cardona (Catalunya)

Jordi Savall, viola da gamba y direccion

Sophie Brandao, viola da gamba bajo

Lorenz Duftschmid, violone

Jean-Pierre Canilhac, cornetto

Alfredo Bernardini, chirimia

Daniel Lassalle, sacabuche tenor

Josep Borras, dulzaina

Michel Behringer, organo

Andrew Lawrence-King, arpa

Michele Claude, percusion

There is a certain attraction to music of the viola da gamba, but usually, a few tunes are enough. Not that the gamba is not a beautiful instrument: round and rich-toned, supremely sensitive to the touch, and sublimely evocative of the human voice, the gamba is arguably one of the most soulful instruments ever devised. But the repertoire for the gamba makes extended listening emotionally fatiguing. The French music veers from the sentimental to the suicidal, the German repertoire ranges from the dour to the dismal, and the English repertoire is so fatalistic as to hardly exist in this world. Thus, getting through a whole disc of the gamba is like playing Russian roulette: the more you play, the more likely it is that you'll come to grief. But not on this disc by Jordi Savall. Savall is the undisputed duke of despair, the master of melancholy, and the raja of the gamba. There is nothing he cannot do on the instrument: no technical problem is too difficult, and no emotional state is too extreme. On his solo disc Les voix humaines, Savall's gamba sings of love and other things with the ease of genius. From the opening Prelude by Abel to the closing Bouree by Bach, Savall performs with a grace and eloquence that put him among the greatest musicians of our time. The French pieces by Marais and Sainte-Colombe are bliss. The dances by Bach are a delight. The lone work by Tobias Hume again lives up to its name. And, for all the hopeless despair of the music, Savall's performance is itself so consoling that one goes away from Les voix humaines wishing the disc ran longer than its nearly 80 minutes.

All Music Guide