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 ...
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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...
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