Rhétorique du Silence Works by Gaultier, Gallot, Visée, Dufaux and Mézangeau David Bergmüller (lute) Berlin Classics 0303039BC 40:31 mins
In his first solo album, lutenist David Bergmüller explores the delicate balances between sound and silence through the medium of 17th-century French music. As with a number of recent recordings, the idea came from the isolation enforced by the pandemic, when Bergmüller was holed up in a cabin in rural Austria with just his lute, a microphone, a camera and a distant online audience for company.
The hand-picked programme for his recital draws on the vast repertoire of solo lute, theorbo and guitar music composed for French royal and aristocratic patrons from around 1620-1700. It includes movements from Robert de Visée’s familiar suite in A minor, and also pieces by relatively unknown composers – including the premiere recording of an Allemande by François Dufaux. Bergmüller himself contributes two of his own lightly textured Preludes.
All the music on the album was intended for private performance, and Bergmüller holds the listener’s attention by virtue both of his skilled playing on modern copies of a Baroque lute and theorbo and his ability to highlight tonal contrasts of light and dark and to exploit suspenseful moments between musical movement and rest. The close positioning of the microphones in the recording made in the abbey church of Seitenstetten near Linz adds to the sense of contemplative focus and intimacy. It also picks up and amplifies Bergmüller’s sharp intakes of breath, which can be disconcerting and distracting. The monastery bells, on the other hand, are more of a welcome and atmospheric intrusion.
John-Pierre Joyce