More than four centuries stand between the emergence of the first violas da gamba and that of the electric guitar. The gap is somewhat narrower between Marin Marais, composer and violist at the court of Louis XIV, and Burkhard Stagl, an Austrian guitarist, composer and improviser of experimental music born in 1960. Stangl has responded to Marais with subtle musical commentaries on his own instrument, driven by the conviction that, had Marais known the elctric guitar, he would probably have embraced its musical possibilities.

The viola da gamba player Eva Reiter and the guitarist Tom Pauwels — two pillars of the Ictus ensemble — bring together works by Marais and the contemporary echoes they have inspired in Stangl. Performing Marais’ works on bothe the viola da gamba and the elctric guitar, they draw a bridge between two distant points on the timeline of music history. Or perhaps they view this timeline as a vast soundscape, where different eras become simultaneously accessible to our contemporary ears. Our conception of time moving in a single direction begins to waver: pathways open up between eras, allowing them to engage in a two-way dialogue. It is a though Stangl were not merely responding to Marais, but that Marais had sent a sonic message into the future, intended for Stangl and today’s listeners.

A paradox that is only on the surface, much like the title of this concert, taken from an opera by Marais, written for Versailles but now lost. In this dramatic idyll to which Reiter au Pauwels, Marais and Stangl invite us, the distinction between what belongs to the past, the present of the future eventually dissolves. Until time itself stands still.

Ticket sales open on 13 Octobre at 1:30 pm