Marin Marais : transcribed and edited by Reidar Edvarsen
Bergmann Edition: 32 pages
Marin Marais was a baroque French composer for the Viola da Gamba, an instrument for which he wrote literally hundreds of works. The Norwegian guitarist Reidar Edvarsen has explained that as the Viola da Gamba has a similar number of strings and tuning to the guitar, that the works he chose fitted remarkably well onto the guitar.Out of the many hundreds of works, our transcriber has chosen 15 that have been organized by him in suites by tonality, although he admits that this is entirely up to the players to decide upon.
Therefore we find ourselves with 5 little suites, of 2 , 3, or 4 pieces all of which are very varied in style and all of which fit really well on the guitar, although to be fair, there were a couple that I thought didn’t entirely suit our instrument . but that’s the sort of thing that another player would entirely disagree with .There are some moments when your choice of speed has to be carefully selected as a few do possess some moments when one is asked to perform extremely fast runs, in very small notes!
But all in all, this is a rare selection of music that the huge majority of guitarists will not have tried before, and so it can only be a desirable book that guitarists can pick and choose their favourites from, but you really do have to be at least a moderately good player to cope with them.
Chris Dumigan
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