Salomé Gasselin encountered the viola da gamba the day she gave up the violin. “I was 10 years old and had just told my music school teacher in Cholet that I wanted to quit music. In the hallway, there was a viola da gamba in tune. Love at first sight was immediate. » The little girl, born on June 19, 1993 in Nantes and raised in the vineyards of the Mauges region, alongside a professional flutist mother, does not yet know how much her life will change.
Long embodied by male figures, such as Jordi Savall, herald of the soundtrack of Alain Corneau’s famous film, All the mornings of the world (1991), the viola da gamba imposes today a new generation of powerful and determined young women. Salomé Gasselin invited us to her Parisian haunt, Judith Kraft’s violin-making workshop, at 99 rue du Faubourg-du-Temple. A calm and bright place, on the first floor of a former factory, in a courtyard protected from the noise of this lively district of the 10e arrondissement.
It was there that at the age of 15, on the advice of her teacher at the Nantes Conservatory, Julien Léonard, the young girl landed to acquire her first instrument. “There are not many viola da gamba luthiers in Europe, she comments, and Judith works for everyone. She not only brought me a sound imagination but also a great affective stability. She’s kind of my second mom. »
As in any microcosm, dubbing is a must. Salomé Gasselin first played for Judith Kraft. Then she waited three years – the time for the luthier, who lent her one in the meantime, to make her viola da gamba. “From that moment, I progressed at an incredible speed. » National Conservatory of Music in Lyon (with Marianne Muller), then the Koninklijk conservatorium in The Hague, in the Netherlands (with Philippe Pierlot), finally the Mozarteum in Salzburg (Austria), where Salomé Gasselin studied with Vittorio Ghielmi, ostracized in France because it breaks with custom. “He comes from a completely different school, quite muscular, with uncompromising biases, she argues. When I left to work with him, I was told that it was not a good idea, that he was an Italian macho. But he is the one who gave me the most. »
Independent temperament
It seems that the great virtuosity of the Italian violist and his way of making the instrument sound with the brilliance devolved to the cello are in fact contrary to the more intimate taste developed in France in the 1980s by cellists who had become gambists, eager, to affirm their choice, to differentiate or even oppose the two instruments. Salomé Gasselin is amused by these positions which seem to awaken the arguments developed by the famous treatise Defense of the bass viol against the enterprises of the violin and the pretensions of the cello, published in 1740 by the jurist Hubert Le Blanc, in Amsterdam.
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