The Scale Knitters: Marais

The Strad Issue: August 2025

Description: A viol master soars to the heights in a violin album

Musicians: The Scale Knitters

Works: Marais: La Gamme en forme de petit Opéra; Sonate à la Maresienne; Sonnerie de Sainte-Geneviève du Mont de Paris

Catalogue number: RICERCAR RIC471

How surprising that Marin Marais, champion of the viol, should have composed an entire volume for the violin before his final Pièces de viole. Was he trying to keep up with the times, or inspired by a visiting virtuoso? Either way, the hybrid mix of violin and bass viol over a basso continuo would have been unheard of in France at the time.

French ensemble The Scale Knitters – violin, two bass viols, theorbo and harpsichord – recreates Marais’s Italianate foray here in evocative performances recorded in a bright, resonant church acoustic.

Through 40 minutes of short successive movements, Marais’s La Gamme (‘The Scale’) takes the listener through all the keys up and down a C major scale. Its music is full of variety and contrasting textures, moving from ponderous bass viol with harpsichord to duetting violin and high tessitura bass viol, before the violin suddenly breaks into skittish semiquaver runs.

The clear, high tones of Fiona-Émilie Poupard’s violin sing out in the Italianate Sonate à la Maresienne, a multi-movement solo sonata with basso continuo in which Poupard’s expressive use of ornamentation is particularly striking. The wonderful Sonnerie de Sainte-Geneviève brings the disc to a close, its three-note ostinato churning away beneath the increasingly intricate interplay between violin and bass viol.

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