Artist · Bowed vihuelas, Viol

Fernando Marín

6 recordings · 0 sheet music editions

Biography

Originally from Alicante, Spain, Fernando Marín is a cellist, viola da gamba player and musicologist specialising in Renaissance and Baroque bowed instruments, historically informed performance and chamber music. He holds a doctorate in musicology; his thesis examined the Hispanic vihuela de arco, its sound and gut strings. His research into the origins, playing methods and repertoire of early bowed instruments has informed his work on bowing techniques for accompanying the voice and on the manufacture of historical gut strings.

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He studied in Oviedo, Prague, Cologne, Brussels and Barcelona, with Wieland Kuijken among his principal teachers. With soprano Nadine Balbeisi he founded Cantar alla Viola, a duo devoted to medieval and Renaissance music. Their recordings include the complete polyphonic works of Juan Blas de Castro, Robert Jones’s The Second Booke of Songs and Ayres (1601), music for the vihuela de arco in the Kingdom of Aragon, William Corkine’s Each Lovely Grace: The Second Booke of Ayres (1612), and Segreti Accenti, featuring works by Luca Marenzio, Costanzo Festa and Luzzasco Luzzaschi.

His solo recordings include eVIOLution, exploring the origins and development of the viola da gamba; sCORDAtura, devoted to historical gut strings and different tunings; The Art of the Vihuela de Arco; Magia consoni et dissoni; and Cello’s Inside. He designs and builds historical instruments and produces and supervises his own recordings. He also collaborates regularly with Carles Magraner and Capella de Ministrers in concerts and recordings.

Marín has published articles on musical rhetoric, improvisation, gut strings and early music performance in musicological journals, including Nassarre and Quodlibet. With Nadine Balbeisi and composer, choral director, jazz pianist and harpsichordist Jean Kleeb, he formed the trio Viola da Samba, which recorded De rio a Rio.

His research and teaching in historical performance and early bowed instruments have taken him throughout Europe and the United States. In 2017 he received a Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators from the BBVA Foundation for a project on the recovery and musical interpretation of Renaissance bowed vihuelas. He has taught viola da gamba at the Conservatorio Profesional de Música in Zaragoza since 2003.

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