Bagpipes From Hell - Music for viola da gamba, lyra-viol and liuto, ceterone of 17th and 18th century

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Editor's Info:
The Instrument of Fantasy

Evolution theories can be equally applied to instruments. Sooner or later every instrument was forced to face what Charles Darwin called the "struggle for life". After enjoying popularity, the ever changing circumstances - audience, halls, styles, taste - meant that some instruments were replaced by others, either more powerful in sound or simply more apt to meet the demands of the new music. That's how shawns, clavichords or theorbos, once indispensable for the performance of certain music, became later, as if swallowed by history, mere relics of the past.

The viola da gamba was an outstanding bowed string instrument for most of the Renaissance and the Baroque eras. It was often used both in secular and liturgical contexts, but it didn't survive the appearance of the nucleus of what we consider now the modern orchestra or, on a smaller scale, the modern string quartet. Viola da gamba was a perfect instrument to double or to support the voices, to perform a continuo line, to join some other instruments of its own family (the pieces for consort of viols are one of the glories of the Renaissance and Baroque music), but by the time when Bach was composing his Sixth Brandenburg Concerto, including two viols, in the 1720's he was already writing for an instrument which had definitely gone out of fashion. Viol's time was sadly over.

Before that, the viola da gamba enjoyed a magnificent splendour, especially in France, England and Italy. Some incredible virtuosos, like Diego Ortiz, Silvestro Ganassi, Marin Marais, Thobias Hume, Cristopher Simpson (who wrote an influential treatise on the instrument), or both Forquerays, were also prolific composers and it was largely his responsibility to build up a repertory which exploits all the technical and expressive possibilities of the instrument. Agile, subtle, polyphonic - these three adjectives might aptly sum up three of the main virtues of the viol.

Marais' or Forqueray's pieces, with their descriptive titles, are rich in allusions not always easy to grasp for a modern listener but that never deprives them of their immediate appeal, Simpson's music is technically very demanding and his "Ground Divisions" are a brief summary of the viol's technique and, not least, a breathtaking display of fantasy in the classical form of variations upon an ostinato bass. Some anonymous pieces, originally conceived for bagpipe, show us a completely new face when performed by viol and lute. Baroque composers were also very fond of writing pieces in which the viola da gamba assumed the personality of other instruments, like bells or even the hurdy-gurdy (our recording includes good examples of both Jekyll-Hyde transformations composed by Antoine Forqueray and Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe). No success could have been possible without the instrument's flexibility. For some decades the viol was actually a world in small.

Vittorio Ghielmi and Luca Pianca both belong to the world-known Italian Baroque ensemble "Il Giardino Armonico". Their performance of this unusual programme - where no real bagpipe can be heard, but just two string instruments moving from one fantastic scene to another - is full of the freedom and sense of improvisation that demands this music. Luca Pianca also performs on the lute a piece by Silvius Leopold Weiss, a strict contemporary of Bach, and a composer whose genius is still far from being fully recognized.

by Luis Gago