Jonathan Dunford, Ensemble A Deux Violes Esgales - Marin Marais: Suites Inedites: Pieces de Violes Inedites, Vol II (2002) CD-Rip

With this CD, Jonathan Dunford completes his project to record all of the known unpublished pièces de viole of Marin Marais. They survive uniquely, without concordances, in Marais’s own hand in a manuscript, found in the National Library of Scotland, that belonged to a young Scottish contemporary. Although the manuscript provides only the viol part, Dunford’s colleagues happily improvise continuo parts on a second viol, a theorbo or a Baroque guitar and a harpsichord – inspired, they say, by jazz.
Modern players usually perform all pieces of a given suite using the same combination of forces, but Dunford has opted in each movement for what he and his colleagues have determined as the ‘ideal solution’. And the pieces are grouped here in suites merely on the basis of keys and not because they were necessarily originally intended to be heard in succession.
There are many gems here and once again we are grateful to Dunford for reviving them. Some clearly harken back to the musical idiom of Marais’s distinguished teacher Sainte-Colombe, as the arrangement for two viols of the Menuet in track 8 effectively demonstrates. In others, Dunford draws parallels with the styles of some of Marais’s peers, including Machy and D’Anglebert; indeed several of the pièces de viole are heard in arrangements for solo guitar, theorbo or keyboard, just as they might have been in Marais’s day.
But in spite of the idiomatic and often eloquent playing of Benjamin Perrot and Laurent Stewart, it may not surprise you that my favourite track is of the highly rhetorical A major Grande Prélude, which Dunford performs without accompaniment. For my taste, there are too many combinations proposed in too short a space of time, and altogether too much going on when they decide to play tout ensemble (tracks 3, 14, 21 and 22). The over-elaborated C major Allemande, Sarabande and Gigue illustrate my point only too well.