He trained as a cellist, that we know; and he is also a quartet player, conductor and teacher; but above all, he is a musician – that is to say that he is unable to play without feeling, unable to feel without also a desire to understand. Such absolute requirements transform an artist's life. His studies led him to the great musical repertoire, but as an all-round musician, he also wanted to interpret new works of the present day and know how to perform early music – that of the eighteenth, or even seventeenth, century. Or, rather, he wanted to know how each type of music, each composer – each work – ought to be played, over and above the petty quarrels that exist between different schools of thought; to delve deep into scores, publications, treatises, texts, musical history, with the aim of finding out.
But still that was not enough. He had to research the instruments themselves, their making, the way they are played, their evolution. And that's when the interpreter's experience and sensitivity take on their full importance. Christophe Coin knew that: his approach reconciles instrumental technique with the study of methods and organology, not so much for their own sake as for their application, through intuition and years of practice, of something that no treatise, no score will ever be able to tell. Going so far as to find the internal logic of the composer's musical discourse, the necessity of his thought. Whence the evident obligation to take that exemplary approach still further, from a personal level to the quartet, then on to the instrumental ensemble and the use of voices.
He plays the cello and the viola da gamba, but he is also a researcher and a co-ordinator. Baroque music is certainly one of his specialities, but the Romantic and modern periods are also important to him. He has a passionate and communicative eagerness to learn, find out, know more – to know everything he can about sound; to rediscover all the original freshness and spirit of the works he plays. And he is ready to take the risk of making new interpretations, each unique and never to be performed exactly the same again.
Even so, he needed other musicians to adhere to the same artistic approach, both on a human and a spiritual level. The Limoges Baroque Ensemble could not be shaped in a day. The musicians co-opted had to be shaped into an ‘ensemble’, by the mysterious alchemy of patient group work. They all share the same high standards and each brings with him the fruit of his knowledge, ideas and personal experience. They form a living organism, breathing with one breath, moving with one movement, capable of the collective reflexes that come as a result of sharing careful research and thinking together along the same lines. And the ensemble is rich because of the elements that are constantly brought to it by each individual member.
Gilles Cantagrel
Translation by Charles Johnston
