It is a happy coincidence that these recordings arrived for review at the same time. In spite of the energetic research in recent years, we still know very little about the Sainte-Colombes, father and son. Marin Marais (briefly a pupil of the father and a contemporary of the son) and his music are better known. Both the elder Sainte-Colombe and Marais came into greater prominence as a result of the 1991 film Tous les matins du monde. However, neither the film nor the novel by Pascal Quignard on which it was based makes reference to the existence of Sainte-Colombe le fils. We now know that the family was Protestant and the son seems to have sought refuge in Britain when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which granted religious and civil liberties to Protestants, in 1685. As a Catholic, Marais was free to make his way in Paris and at court as an opera composer and viol player. These recordings offer fascinating musical evidence of the ways in which the bass viol repertoire developed as a result.Susie Napper and Margaret Little, who perform as Les Voix humaines, have issued the first of two CDs of the concerts à deux violes esgales of Sainte-Colombe le père. These are passionately committed performances, resonant and full of fresh insights, of a repertoire that often seems to occupy a world of its own. Napper and Little have momentarily penetrated the mists of time. Their ensemble in the unmeasured passages is like that of trapeze artists, trusting and perfectly timed. The range of Sainte-Colombe’s expression is vividly portrayed, from the swaggering to the rhapsodic, infused along the way with delicate internal phrasing, moments of titillating two-finger vibrato further enhanced by changes of speed and growling, Hellish-sounding notes from the low A string he was the first to employ. I eagerly await the completion of this set.Jordi Savall has served for many years as the supreme exponent of French viol playing. If there are younger players challenging him now for that position it is because he taught them so well and because it is inevitable that it should be so. In the early days he infused his playing with his considerable personality; later he became more introspective and now he would seem to have achieved a sublime equilibrium that suits Marais very well. During the 1990s he recorded some of the concerts (with Wieland Kuijken and Christophe Coin) and solo pieces of the Sainte-Colombes. It was his playing that served as Sainte-Colombe’s in the film.Although the existence of the music of Sainte-Colombe le fils has been known for some time, it is rarely performed. Savall has remedied the situation by recording all that is known, and it is revelatory, especially when juxtaposed with Marais’ music. It was perhaps inevitable that the son’s music owed more to the father’s than did Marais’. Lully, after all, was Marais’ true mentor, and it was Marais’ long apprenticeship at the Opéra that sharpened his skills as a composer and a communicator.Marais worked with Sainte-Colombe le fils only a very short time. And yet, as you will hear, the son developed his own distinctive voice, rather as CPE Bach later did. The formal disciplines of Lully are absent from his suites and yet they have moments of rhetorical power and they range widely in their expression. They are more self-indulgent, more wayward than those of Marais. Like his father, Sainte-Colombe le fils makes frequent use of the seventh string and chords, although they lack the grace of those of the other composers and the harmonic richness of Marais. Savall’s performances may seem surprisingly unsentimental, but at least for me they reflect a deep engagement with the music, for which I am grateful. It is surely not by chance that Savall chose to record this music on a 1697 seven-string instrument made in London by Barak Norman. Does he think Sainte-Colombe le fils may have asked or inspired the English maker to add a seventh string to some of his renowned bass viols?