L'Achéron / François Joubert-Caillet

EARLY MUSIC

Marin Marais

Viol pieces

MARIN MARAIS: THE ANGEL AND THE COMPASS

There are two forces at work in Marais: the Angel – his profound music, faithful to French taste, almost sacred – and the Compass – his spirit of exploration, pedagogy and guidance.

For Marais is not content merely to play. He teaches; his books are manuals, his pieces lessons. He experiments (with new tonalities, broken forms, unexpected combinations of instruments), guiding not only his pupils but also his era towards a more lively, freer, more human Baroque, moving towards the Enlightenment.

The Angel invites you to listen. The compass urges you to lose yourself in the labyrinths of his suites, in the whirlwinds of his jigs, in the silences of his Tombeaux.

He is not only a court musician who witnessed the intimacy of Louis XIV for some forty years, he is a navigator of the soul, and his viola is his instrument of truth.

Bass viol & harpsichord

HUMAN VOICES

Marin Marais' music has travelled through the centuries and still moves us deeply: perhaps because in the best-known part of his work he does not seek to impress, but invites us to listen in silence, in confidence. His music is based on gentle, almost hypnotic repetitions, a simple, profound form that still speaks to us today, like a familiar whisper.

No grandeur. No spectacle. Just a viola, a lute, and raw emotions: reverie, tenderness, pain, playfulness, farewell. This is not early music, it is human music, intimate music, which has stood the test of time without losing its appeal.

Bass viola & theorbo

Press

Jean-Marc Petit, La Voix du Nord, juillet 2023

(…) Arrivé au terme des presque 600 pièces de viole (vingt disques!) qui composent ces cinq Livres François Joubert-Caillet continue de nous enchanter. Cette musique sans âge se déguste à toute heure, et est un baume pour la vie

Discography

First book of viol pieces

Ricercar/Outhere, 2018

Second book of pieces of violas

François Joubert-Caillet, viola da gamba

Ricercar, 2019

Release October 11th 2019

Troisième Livre de pièces de violes

François Joubert-Caillet,viola da gamba
L'ACHÉRON

Ricercar, 2021

Between the publication of the Second Book in 1701 and that of the Third Book, ten years went by, during which Marais established himself as a composer of tragédies lyriques. In the meantime, however, a number of young viol players, some of whom had been his pupils, had just published their first collections of pièces de viole. Marais therefore had to reaffirm his position as the reigning master of the genre, a mission accomplished to perfection with this new opus, in which he strove to offer his public easier pieces alongside others that of a more demanding nature, in order to ‘satisfy those who are more advanced upon the viol’. His style had changed too: here, character pieces form an increasingly important complement to the traditional suites.

Quatrième Livre de pièces de violes

François Joubert-Caillet,viola da gamba
L'ACHÉRON

Ricercar, 2021

It was two years after the death of Louis XIV that Marin Marais published his Quatrième Livre de Pièces de Viole. In it he asserted himself as the master of the genre, offering his public both pieces intended for "those who are advanced on the viol" and for the most virtuoso musicians. Stylistically, the classical forms are distorted, the suites no longer following the traditional pattern and making increasing use of character pieces. The sometimes whimsical imagery provided by these new pieces and the formal freedom asserted find their apogee in the surprising Suitte d'un goût étranger, the thirty or so pieces of which both approach hitherto unheard-of tonalities and offer a multitude of characters and sometimes exotic evocations. And in a new way, somewhat influenced by the genre of Italian trios, Marais concluded this Quatrième Livre with two suites for three viols, a genre he claimed was "new to France.