Johanna Rose: Visions du Diable

The Strad Issue: May 2026

Description: A compellingly wrought programme offers riches

Musicians: Johanna Rose (viola da gamba) Javier Nuñez (harpsichord)

Works: Music by Marais (arr. Rose) and Forqueray

Catalogue number: RUBICON CLASSICS RCD1216

Hubert Le Blanc, who compared Marin Marais and Antoine Forqueray’s performances respectively as being ‘like an angel’ and ‘like a devil’, was doubtless mindful of the dramatic content and fiendish technical demands of Forqueray’s Pièces de viole.

Johanna Rose’s account of the Fifth Suite demonstrates real empathy with the idiom, notably in the magisterial, occasionally brash ‘La Rameau’, melancholy Sarabande ‘La Léon’ and nostalgic ‘La Sylva’.

She makes light work of the virtuosic ‘La Guignon’ and ‘Le Montigni’, but some roughness remains in the gigue-like ‘La Boisson’. Harpsichordist Javier Nuñez provides sympathetic support, occasionally adopting a brief solo role.

Rose’s ‘demonising’ of seven pieces from Marais’s Sixth Suite (from his Pièces de viole, Book 2) involves her dispensing with continuo instruments in favour of going it alone. Although somewhat monochrome, her arranged ‘visions’ are effective and convincing, her chordal playing generally well-voiced and her specific ornaments faithfully realised.

She frees herself from metrical restraints in the Prélude, nods towards inégalité in the Fantaisie and performs the various dances pliantly and stylishly.

Enlisting Nuñez’s support in the ‘Tombeau pour Mr de Ste Colombe’, she realises its petits coups d’archet with venom. ‘Les voix humaines’ (Suite no.3) provides a tender, melancholic conclusion. The recording combines immediacy with an enhancing ambient warmth.

ROBIN STOWELL