Benedetto Marcello / Isabel Mundry

The Sonatas either for two cellos or two viols and basso continuo, along with those published few years before for cello and continuo, are considered an early contribution to the cello sonata genre, which developed in the early eighteenth century in Italy – then the centre of soloistic cello playing. Their publication came at a time when the composer, very prominent in Italian musical life at the beginning of the eighteenth century, had already strongly curtailed his activities and was primarily composing religious works. Despite his subsequent disinterest in instrumental music, at the beginning of his activity Marcello proved to be perfectly consistent with the great innovative ferment of Venetian music outside the scope of opera and sacred music. In this sense, the aristocrat Marcello, in his polemic against the opera theatre, perfectly embraced the experimental and abstract language of instrumental music, participating in the great planning of musical modernity underway in Venice in the first half of the eighteenth century.

With the interplay of two viols and a cello, two different worlds come together, from the perspective of our times. One is associated with timbres that range from the melodies of Johann Sebastian Bach to the extended sounds of our present; the other seems like an echo, emerging from a past epoch. The phenomena also intermingle in my composition: the sounds of the similar and yet different instruments viola da gamba and violoncello, their characteristic colours, playing techniques, articulations, ways of speaking to me, seeming to be near or far, as an echo or an empty space. And behind this, other phenomena emerge: historical dance and character pieces, atmospheres, melodic configurations or their transitions into polyphonies and even musical forms that were already in the distant past, even in the age of the viola da gamba. 

Isabel Mundry