Baroque: Nils Mönkemeyer
Nils Mönkemeyer and friends explore the beguiling world of the French and German Baroque with a fascinating programme: a premiere recording of a Suite by Robert de Visée, viola arrangements of Bach and, with soprano Dorothee Mields, two arias by the little-known Michel Lambert.
Read more…Between the end and the beginning
When the lute and its bigger sister, the theorbo, fell out of fashion, composers began to take an interest in the viola. This may have been only a chronological accident, but there is a certain charm to the thought that the viola, with its penchant for melancholy, may have inherited the meditative sound of the lute.
The two instruments rub shoulders, as it were, in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. He was one of the last composers to write for the lute, and one of the first to discover the viola as a solo instrument. In his Third Brandenburg Concerto the violins, cellos and violas play with and against each other on a fully equal basis. The Sixth Brandenburg goes so far as to feature two violas as principal solo instruments. Nothing like this had happened before. In those days violas still came in various sizes and were employed in the tutti, played by less ambitious musicians or even menials whose names were rarely so much as mentioned in the lists of the court chapel.
But Bach appreciated the viola and played it himself. As his son Carl Philipp Emanuel put it, probably in reference to Bach’s appearances with his Collegium Musicum in Leipzig’s Café Zimmermann, "As the greatest expert and judge of harmony, he liked best to play the viola, with appropriate loudness and softness." The viola was an instrument that allowed the musical events and the "harmony" to be guided from the middle of the ensemble. This apparently appealed to Bach, as did the instrument’s solo potential.
Bach was well-versed in French music. He studied works by Jean-Baptiste Lully and François Couperin at an early age. He may even have come into contact with pieces by Robert de Visée and Michel Lambert, both of whom, like Lully and Couperin, were employed at the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV. They even had personal ties: Lambert was Lully’s father-in-law, and the two men worked closely together (Lambert helped Lully to compose his ballets). Nonetheless, Lambert was employed at the royal court as a singer and voice teacher. The word spread in Paris that none could teach singing as well as he. As a composer he was one of the first to combine the melodious and dramatic style of Italian music with French elegance. He thereby created a new French style that also served Lully and later François Couperin. Some 330 arias proceeded from his pen, mostly of a mournful character, for the words he set often deal with the sorrows of love.
Little is known about the life of Robert de Visée. He began his career at the court of the Sun King as a guitarist and lutenist and had to play to the king in his private chambers – at his bedside in the evening, for example, before falling asleep. Later de Visée was appointed "guitar teacher to the king", an office that he passed on to his son when he reached advanced age. In 1732 his name vanishes from the royal payslips, suggesting that he may have died in that year.
Several collections of suites for guitar, lute and the lower-pitched theorbo have come down to us from his pen. In some cases, such as the F minor Suite, de Visée added a part for melody instrument – a practice that in turn inspired Nils Mönkemeyer and Andreas Arend to add a viola to their own version of Bach’s Lute Suite (BWV 995).
Extract from the booklet text by Clemens Haustein (translation: J. Bradford Robinson)