Welcome to the Accademia del Piacere shop. If you become a member of Accademia Club, you can get this CD free of charge, along with many other benefits.
There have not been many geniuses since the glorious days of these illustrious artists; around the time of the death of Louis XIV, nature seemed to rest.
—Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV
“Angels are plural and equivocal”, wrote the poet Rafael Pérez Estrada, and I think of that ambiguity of the archangel, between heavenly and demonic, as I am shaken by the alternations and successive undulations of this album, half godlike and half barbaric, alternately “capricious and lunatic” – as Hubert Le Blanc described the wild, diabolical nerve of Antoine Forqueray – only to change at once into the heightened, tormented sensitivity of the intimate and poetic Marin Marais. It is strange: you listen to the album now forwards, now backwards, and both profiles always fit together symmetrically, like exact reverse sides. Once again I find the explanation in Pérez Estrada, who notes: “Exact lovers have a single shadow.” The juxtaposition of the opposites Forqueray and Marais also casts a single, global shadow.
