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Bach & Sainte Colombe. Live concert celebrated in Seville, Espacio Turina, in November 2023. The album 7 MOVEMENTS is available on RUBICON CLASSICS. For more info please go to: You can follow me on Instagram: Facebook: Spotify: Filmed and recorded by Felix Vazquez About the album: New approaches to old ways: on her new album 7 MOVEMENTS Johanna Rose unites the golden age of the viola da gamba with its declining years by combining movements from suites by Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe – highly esteemed in his time as a virtuoso on the gamba – with Cello Suites by Johann Sebastian Bach which have become such firm fixtures in the musical canon today. When putting together the album, Johanna Rose has ‘augmented’ Bach’s Cello Suites BWV 1011 and 1012 by appending a Sainte- Colombe movement to each, resulting in seven-movement structures with a related musical language and aesthetic. The creative genius of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) transcended all boundaries of form and style, something that caused headaches for his contemporaries but which ensures that his music exert s its power right down to the present day. Inspired in particular by French and Italian music, Bach was forever pondering the technical means and possibilities be queathed to him by his musical forebears in order to arrive at a wholly individual musical idiom of his own. In this, according to musicologist Georg von Dadelsen, he readily availed himself of ‘obsolete forms, albeit not in a regressive way, while adopting up-to-date stylistic devices and compositional practices, without giving the impression of an overt modernity’. This was also arguably what Bach was striving for in his Cello Suites, whose compositional form was at that time more typical of the viola da gamba and therefore something of an anachronism. And by designating the six solo suites BWV 1007 to 1012 for the newly developed cello, with its much stronger sound, Bach was again crafting a blend of old and new. Today the suites are an integral component of auditions and entrance exams and it is almost impossible to imagine them not being a part of the repertoire of all aspiring and accomplished cellists. That the suites also work well on the older sister instrument, the gamba, may additionally be due in part to the fact that Bach possibly wasn’t entirely ready to bid adieu to the ‘old’ sound. For, as intimated by the copy of the suites made by Johann Peter Kellner, he may also have had in mind a large viol, tuned like the cello but held on one arm, the so-called ‘viola basso’. From the historical perspective at least, the French gamba virtuoso Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe represents a striking contrast with the musical ‘sovereign’ that is J.S. Bach. Despite being in his day a celebrated virtuoso on his instrument and evidently an admired solo gamba player at the court of the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV, neither his exact dates of birth and death ( to between 1690 and 1700) nor his actual name are known to us. Which is why he appears in the history books simply as ‘Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe’. And yet, Sainte-Colombe had an immense influence on gamba music. Like Bach, he seems to have been an innovator, always striving to develop his music further and further. As such, he is credited with having added a seventh string to the gamba, this bottom A string affording the instrument a greater range as well as expressive power.
