A short-lived instrument which has long since disappeared, the arpeggione is a weird and wonderful creation. Dreamt up with the wild imagination of the Austrian luthier Johann Georg Stauffer, who specialized in guitars, this instrument which was invented in 1823 is a kind of 6-string guitar that is played with a bow. It was rather awkward to play, the six strings and the shape of the bridge making the bowing particularly delicate. The arpeggione has long since joined the cohort of instrumental oddities forever populating dusty museum windows, testimony to the creativity of curious inventors. A guitarist himself, like many young romantic men, Schubert became so interested in this instrument that he dedicated a sonata to it. Mainly played today on the cello, it was made famous in the 20th century by the legendary recordings of Emmanuel Feuermann in 1937 and then of Rostropovitch with Benjamin Britten in the early 1960s. It is now commonly played by cellists.
Guido Balestracci has crafted a programme around this famous sonata with transcriptions of works by Schubert for rare instruments: fortepiano, terz guitar, archlute and, of course, an arpeggione reconstructed by the Italian luthier Paolo Giuseppe Rabino in 2011 based on an instrument made in Prague in the 19th century. Although this rehabilitation is not the first on record, it nevertheless allows us to recover a strange sound that we thought had been lost. © François Hudry/Qobuz