Martin Panchaud

Counterfeit² is the first full-length studio album by Martin Gore, the primary songwriter for the band Depeche Mode.
Martin Gore's Counterfeit² beat David Gahan's Paper Monsters to the punch by just over a month; with some better timing - and, you know, a synchronous album from Andrew Fletcher - Depeche Mode could've pulled a Kiss. This first full-length from DM's principal songwriter follows an EP he released 14 years prior. On that EP, Gore covered some of his favorite songs and made them sound unsurprisingly like his group circa that year. As one can tell from the title of this disc, this is the same concept, and even some of the most ardent fans no doubt breathed another sigh of relief with the knowledge that he decided once again to let other people provide the lyrics…

The arpeggione would probably be completely forgotten today had not Franz Schubert written for it his famous Sonata in A minor, D. 821, in 1824. Invented by Johann Georg Staufer in 1823, the arpeggione can be described as a kind of hybrid cello-guitar. It had frets and six strings tuned like those of a guitar, but was held like a cello and played with a bow.

Marin Marais (1656–1728) besides being Louis XIV’s court musician, was a prolific composer. He composed both operas, certain of which were very successful, instrumental music and some (lost) religious vocal music. As a viol player he published five books which include some of the most interesting and beautiful music for the viol. These five books also are chock full of performance instructions both for the left hand as well as the bow hand. They are a gold mine for viol players and are as relevant to teaching a musician good technique on the viol nowadays as they were when originally printed in the late seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century.