Domenico has raised the topic of a recording by Mario Martinoli, misleadingly sold as undiscovered suites by Louis Marchand.
Martinoli released a digital edition of the score in 2019. (There is a dead link in the above page.) I still have my PDF. The only information given is what is in the CD description: « Livre de Suittes pour le clavecin composé par Monsieur de Charman(t) cordelier, et arrangé par Renard (Mario Martinoli), à Paris, 1754 » . Only 13 pieces are included (there are 20 on the CD).
I haven’t really delved into this music but it is obvious, from the date as well as the style, that it is not Louis Marchand.
The pieces were said to be found in a hand-written manuscript which is now in private hands.
My own view is that these pieces may be of our time. That doesn’t lessen my enjoyment of the CD at all.
"This work belongs to a mid-18th century manuscript book discovered in 2003 in a private French music collection. The manuscript has been inherited by the present owners in 1976 from the dissolved Forestieri-Steiner fund and constitutes an additional hand-written source of 18th century French harpsichord music. The book includes copies of well known music collections of early 18th century, namely by François Couperin, Jean-Phlippe Rameau, Jean-Baptiste Forqueray, Louis-Claude Daquin, Louis Marchand and other minor composers active in Paris around 1740, such as de Bury and Royer.
An early assessment of the Forestieri-Steiner manuscript suggested that the whole book should have been assembled for personal use by a single musician, probably a close friend, a colleague or a pupil of Louis Marchand. This assessment is supported by the presence of unpublished works to be undoubtedly attributed to Louis Marchand and his school. The manuscript includes a series of nineteen pieces not known from other sources or registered in public or private accessible archives and collections. These nineteen compositions are split in two different collections contained in the manuscript, which are at the center of the present recording: the “Livre de Suittes pour le clavecin composè par Monsieur de Charman(t) cordelier, et arrangè par Renard, à Paris, 1754” and the “Recueil des Airs différentes pour le clavessin composèes par plusieurs auteurs, collectées par P. Renard, avec les parties en concert, et la basse, à Paris, [illegible date]”
Why would anyone perpetrate a hoax like this? I really don’t understand. Is it for a joke? Or to test out the pundits and trick them all? To see if he could pass off his own compositions as baroque originals? What on earth?
I remember this discussion on HPSCHD-L. Isn’t Charman(t) a loose anagram of Marchand? Did he actually intend people to see that this is a hoax? Maybe arising from a strange sense of humour or a desire to tease? And isn’t Renard the fox, the trickster?
One might feel more convinced that this MS exists and is indeed from the 18th century if some pages had been published in facsimile.
I did write to Martinoli at one point and ask him whether he had composed these pieces, as his bio says he is a composer. He said he did not write them, and said “About my compositional skills, it’s all about “modern” piano music (and I stopped writing music quite a while ago…).” He believes the source is original, though there isn’t any connection to Marchand; he feels the pieces probably originate from different sources.
I’ve uploaded the PDF of the 13 pieces on WeTransfer. You can download the document for free, but only within the next 7 days. It is worth getting this PDF as it looks like these pieces have disappeared from public view again.
Although I have to say in this rare instance I am averse to having a blatant fake and hoax sitting on the disk on my server taking up space and costing me money! Ha.
There is something fishy about this PDF. I do a lot of engraving (a lot). Every program I know outputs PDF, vector based graphics. But the reason this file is nearly 30MB is that it is a set of scans of images. That is very odd. People don’t normally do this. Perhaps the pieces were obtained from somewhere or somebody else and he did not have the originals. That’s as much forensic digging I can do on the document.
And of course the lack of any whiff of a facsimile page is also fishy. as has been mentioned.
Well, somebody has engraved it, so the normal vectors should be there. Fishy.
I can live without a facsimile page, but I can’t live without at least a single line stating what and where the source(s) is. Fishy again.
No surprise the sheet music appeared briefly and then suddenly disappeared.
Having cursory read the music, in my opinion different details are not consistent with a modern forgery, but rather with a very-late baroque second-rate French composer.
I find HPSCHD-L very difficult to search but eventually located this thread.
In case Davitt doesn’t have time to comment in this current thread, his main point in 2017 was that the two supposedly ‘hard’ pieces of external evidence cited in the CD booklet –
“the dissolved Forestieri-Steiner fund” from which the MS was supposed to have come
a paper by “Rosenthal (2005)” which might contain further details of the MS
do not seem to exist - at least, one cannot find evidence that they exist!
It is hard not to conclude that one is being led down the garden path.
OK, I’ve looked up my little text to HPSCHD-L, dating from 2 Dec 2017. Here it is again, very slightly edited to correct a couple of typos. This still fully represents my position about these pieces.
Best wishes to all,
I am also intrigued by the professional musical(?) profile of this Mario Martinoli – he seems to be behind the recently-resurrected European Union Baroque Orchestra.