Viola da gamba player Ralph Rousseau is not French but Dutch; he uses his mother's maiden name in preference to the tough-to-pronounce Meulenbroeks, his father's name. He confidently maintains that the idea of combining French Baroque gamba music with arrangements of twentieth century French pop "seems completely natural, even evident, to me." In fact the effect is so unusual as to be uncanny, but Chansons d'amour certainly gets points for sheer originality. There are several layers of fusion happening here. First is that ...
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Viola da gamba player Ralph Rousseau is not French but Dutch; he uses his mother's maiden name in preference to the tough-to-pronounce Meulenbroeks, his father's name. He confidently maintains that the idea of combining French Baroque gamba music with arrangements of twentieth century French pop "seems completely natural, even evident, to me." In fact the effect is so unusual as to be uncanny, but Chansons d'amour certainly gets points for sheer originality. There are several layers of fusion happening here. First is that between the realms of song and instrumental music; although the album title promises love songs, all the music is instrumental. Rousseau, who points out that the gamba's top string is called the chanterelle, focuses on the almost declamatory, rhetorical quality that the viola da gamba has in its Baroque language, transferring it with remarkable effectiveness to the likes of Jacques Brel's Ne me quittes pas. Second is the above-mentioned blurring of the classical-popular boundary. Here...
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Add this copy of Chansons D'Amour to cart. $30.06, new condition, Sold by newtownvideo rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from huntingdon valley, PA, UNITED STATES, published 2009 by Challenge.
