Word: viols
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...viol consort Fretwork may well be next on the list of Virgin Classics' fortuitous finds...
...FTER VIOL of careful thought and a session with my Ouija board, I feel able to offer a particle explanation...
...praying. "You speak with God through music," the angel sings, no doubt voicing Messiaen's own conception of his artistic role. "He will reply to you through music. Let the secrets, the secrets of glory open." As the angel begins to play a heavenly viol, an Ondes Martenot sounds a deceptively ingenuous melody. At once oddly angular but celestially serene, it floats above a soft C major chord in the strings and a wordless chorus. The moment is one of beatific bliss, a close approximation of what one imagines the music of the spheres to sound like...
...churning out masterwork after masterwork, there was little need to revive the past. But as the musical repertory gradually evolved into a monument to the 19th century, inquiring performers began to look backward. Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940), an English musician and instrumentmaker, rediscovered the nearly forgotten world of the viol, lute and clavichord, and Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska almost singlehanded shattered the romantic tradition of performing Bach on the piano. "You play Bach your way," she once told a colleague, "and I'll play...
That acting ability, in fact, is what makes Montand such a magnetic singer. His voice is superb, of course, as mellow and true as a bass viol; at 60, he sounds just as good as he did 20 or 30 years ago. But the soul of a Montand song is not just in his voice, it is in his lithe, dancer's body, his mobile face, and his articulate, talkative hands and fingers. The soul is also in the lyrics themselves, and Montand's elegant and inimitable phrasing. The pity, it must be added, is that so much...