Monsieur de Sainte Colombe

01-07 PIÈCES EN RÉ MINEUR
Prélude - Allemande - Courante & double - Sarabande & double - Gigue - Gavotte - Chaconne

08-16 PIÈCES EN SOL
Prélude - Allemande - Courante - Sarabande - Gigue - Menuet - Pianelle - Sarabande - Gigue

17-22 PIÈCES EN RÉ
Petite pièce - Sarabande - Courente & double - Sarabande - Menuet - Vielle

23- 28 PIÈCES EN DO MAJEUR
Ouverture - Menuet - Sarabande en passacaille - Chansonette - Gigue - Chaconne

No engraved portrait, no naturalization act, no fees as member of the King’s Chamber, no inventory after his death; no story picked up by the attentive pen of a Tallemant des Réaux, no juicy anecdotes, no personal writings: Monsieur de Sainte Colombe is a musician without a biography... But not one without music, nor without a reputation often reflected in the period’s texts. A master in both senses of the word: because of his knowledge of the instrument and because of his art in teaching it.

The manuscripts we have used for this recording are the so-called Panmure and Tournus, perhaps the work of pupils (like the Scottish brothers Maule) who brought back home at least part of the master’s corpus of compositions. Therein lies a large proportion (some 180 pieces altogether) of an extremely idiomatic music for the instrument, always highly personal and full of unforeseeable twists and turns, verging on extravagance, which in that respects brings to mind the music (perhaps better known to current audiences of early music) of his Concerts à deux violes égales. A general atmosphere emerges from the manuscripts which fully contradicts the image (analogous to the silver-screen persona of St. Colombe in Tous les matins du monde) of an artist given to obscurity, tormented by pain, complacently abandoning himself to solitude and suffering.

Sainte Colombe’s are not autograph manuscripts; the pieces are grouped haphazardly, jotted down in performance, copied here and there, more or less classified by genre, but the ensemble is awkward to use in that order and hardly revealing of the treasures it contains. It is the performer’s vigour that helps us read the music, as Paolo Pandolfo does here, elaborating on the themes and setting them within the matt gilded frame of a basso continuo...