Campion: Music for Baroque Guitar

Albumbeschreibung

The baroque guitar is quite distant, in its structure, from the modern guitar; in the Baroque period, it was smaller and tapered in size and, above all, possessed only five "courses" – a course, in this case, being a pair of identically tuned strings, with a sound considerably more ample than a single string. The tuning itself offers but few bass notes, even if from one country to another, the tuning seems to have been different, without it being always possible to know exactly what the composers had wanted. One of the principal composers for French baroque guitar was François Campion, and the present album is dedicated to the composer’s works which have been preserved as autographs. Campion was born around 1685 in Rouen. In 1705 his Nouvelles Découvertes sur la Guitarre (“New Discoveries on the Guitar”) was published in Paris. It was one of the last books for the five-course guitar ever to be published. With this work, Campion has positioned himself as one of the finest representatives of the French guitar school at the close of the 17th century. After Campion‘s death in 1747, his nephew donated the composer’s personal copy of the Nouvelles Découvertes to the Bibliothèque du Roi (nowadays the French Bibliothèque Nationale). A hand-written introduction on the first page of the Nouvelles Découvertes shows that Campion had clear ideas about the way he was to be remembered: “Piéces de Guitare du S.r Campion Proffesseur maitre de théorbe et de guitare de L’Academie Royalle de Musique en 1731 Auteur de la Régle de l’Octave”. He was famous primarily as a composer, but also as a virtuoso guitar and theorbo player and a member of the Académie Royale de Musique (the later Opera of Paris), as a teacher, and finally as a theoretician. His personal copy of the Nouvelles Découvertes allows modern performers to follow Campion’s creative process more closely than with almost any other composer, due to the fact that during his lifetime he added countless hand-written pieces. The instrument used by Bernhard Hofstötter for this recording is an unlabelled five-course guitar, built around 1640 and typical for its time, ascribed to the famous maker Matteo Sellas. This guitar is in a surprisingly good shape, given its age. Contrary to many other original instruments, no irreversible change or adaptation to the taste of the 19th century have been made. Therefore it gives us an outstanding idea of how an almost 400 years old guitar sounds today. © SM/Qobuz