Hille Perl and
Lee Santana, a German viola da gamba player and an American theorbo player from Florida, met in Bremen's train station in 1984 and formed what they call a professional and personal "work in progress." Here they offer a disc of music by Marin Marais, a renowned French viol virtuoso and court musician of the late seventeenth century. What fame he has among general listeners comes from his appearance as a character in the 1991 film Tous les matins du monde, which in music-mad Germany caused passers-by,
Perl says, to stop asking her "hey, is that a guitar?" and start asking "is that a six- or a seven-string?" In the U.S., music for viol and theorbo qualifies as an out-of-the-way corner of the musical universe, and
Perl and
Santana make things still more obscure with a lengthy liner-note justification for performing the music on this particular pair of instruments. (It involves the discovery of a Scottish manuscript that did not specify the bass instrumentation that appeared in later Marais publications.) Nevertheless, it's all somehow quite compelling.
Perl is an exceptionally smooth player, and she executes the dances of these French suites with the lightness they deserve. In performing the variation sets that Marais would have used to display his own virtuosity, she's got power in reserve. And the music throughout has that elusive meshing of mutually familiar personalities that is the mark of effective chamber music. Marin Marais: Pour la Violle et le Théorbe, in short, comes off as something personal -- an impression intensified by the elegant dedication, written in the old-fashioned style of the French court, of the music to the public by the performers. One solo theorbo piece, by Robert de Visée, is also included.