Jonathan Dunford: The Viola da Gamba

"I stumbled upon the viola da gamba for the first time when I was twelve years old, two years into cello lessons with the American cellist Fortunato Arico, known to one and all as Freddy. Over the years Freddy had expanded his virtuosity backwards in time, first to the baroque cello, then to the viol. In the New York of the early 70s the viol was still a very rare fish, an exotic, unfamiliar instrument only marginally more identifiable than the Theremin. Freddy liked to give proselytizing concerts, to which he reported like some musical Marley’s ghost, clanking with early and late instruments hanging in their cases from his shoulders. It was at one of those concerts that I heard him play Couperin’s Pièces de viole on his beautiful old Gofriller. Dowland’s many pretty images of being pierced by love’s arrow was my case exactly. I had never heard such music, such a sound. It was love at first, second, and third sight, love that was to be everlasting and undiminished. In short, from that moment I was hooked on the viol and wanted urgently to play it myself..."

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