Rhétorique du Silence
“The first time I held a lute in my hand – I was 16 or 17- I immediately fell in love with the sound,” Tyrolean lutenist David Bergmüller recounts, continuing, “Just playing it, ’empty strings,’ gave me goosebumps and I couldn’t get enough. And that’s still the case today.” On August 18, David Bergmüller will release a solo album of French lute music on Berlin Classics. On it are works by composers who lived and worked between 1568 and 1732. Almost all of the names may not be familiar. Ennemond Gaultier, Jacques Gallot, and René Mézangeau are masterful composers known mainly in the lute scene. But David Bergmüller has made an excellent selection here and thus does not open his world to connoisseurs alone – It is essential to enjoy this music in peace and let it take effect on you. “The charm lies in the quiet tones close to silence, in the basic meditative character. Precisely for this reason, this canon of works still fascinates today and forms a soothing counterpoint to our stimulus-flooded world,” explains David Bergmüller in the enclosed booklet. The album is appropriately titled “Rhétorique du Silence.” “I know of no other music that deals so idiomatically with sound, rhetoric and the silence between phrases as French lute music,” he adds.
The place where David Bergmüller spent several months working on this music fits in with this: A lonely mountain hut in the Alps without Internet access and far from civilization. “Except for the crackling of wood in the fireplace and the rustling of the surrounding trees in the wind, it’s quiet there,” he tells us contentedly, adding the question: “Isn’t it precisely this quality of silence that makes it possible for us to listen in the first place?”
It is, above all, the quiet moments that make this album so unique and haunting. The lute playing begins quietly, delicately, and with single notes, then it increases to virtuoso playing and fills the room. Here David Bergmüller proves what a great master he has become on his instrument. It all started with the classical guitar, but he discovered the baroque lute during his training. In the meantime, David Bergmüller has become a sought-after soloist and ensemble musician. Whether with the Bach Consort Vienna, Fatma Said, the NDR Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, or Maurice Steger – David Bergmüller stands side by side with these artists in many recordings and public appearances. Especially in early music, he is considered a man of the trade. On the other hand, a few months ago, he released an EP with electronic artist Janus Rasmussen, who comes from the Faroe Islands. His acclaimed album “Alter Ego” with clarinetist David Orlowsky even found its way into the classical music charts.
French lute music holds a great fascination for him. Of course, as an instrumentalist, he is primarily concerned with the aspects of performance practice, but also “the stories and myths about the pieces, the subtlety, intricacy, and care of the compositions, the earworms and the sometimes mysterious tradition and genesis of the manuscripts” played a decisive role in the compilation of “Rhétorique du Silence.” David Bergmüller tries to invite his audience into his sound world at concerts. “The most beautiful compliment is when I realize that I have picked up and touched everyone in the room,” he says, referring mainly to the crackling moment between the end of a piece and the applause. “At that moment, the quality of silence is revealed!”. For connoisseurs, this album by David Bergmüller, who now holds a professorship for early music at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne, is a must; for everyone else, it will open up a new musical world that is guaranteed to lead to many goosebump moments.
