
No one plays like Paolo Pandolfo, I'd noticed it years ago in his Forqueray and this De Machy is if anything even more unusual.
He is a master at touch, at timbre, at phrasing and at voicing. Each voice so evident, so clearly given its own character, and the whole played with a sense of the drama between the voices which is astonishing. It's as if the voices are chasing each other . . . no, as if the voices are dancing with each other. Or playing with each other. Playing kiss-chase or hide-and-seek or It.
Neither lyrical nor rhetorical, I'm not presented with someone singing or perorating. So what is it? It's music conceived as fleeting reflections, ephemeral melodies like sparks blown in the wind.
And sooooooo imaginative, he makes all the other viol players look like stick-in-the-muds. To give an example which made me prick up my ears, there's one piece where he plays one voice with the bow and the other pizzicato (G major sarabande.) It's stuffed with viol effects which I've never heard before.
Like all new poetry, my own sense of disorientation is irrelevant to the value of the poem and all part of the adventure of exploration.