My name is Guya Martinini and I have been playing the violin in the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century since 1992. I have also worked as a freelance violinist with numerous orchestras, including Les Arts Florissants, La Grande Écurie, La Chapelle Royale, Les Musiciens du Louvre, La Petite Bande, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, Bach Collegium Japan and Europa Galante. I have also performed a great deal of chamber music with, amongst others, the Hantaï brothers, Lorenzo Coppola, Natsumi Wakamatsu and Hidemi Suzuki. Together with Lorenzo Coppola, I founded two orchestras for young musicians.
It was clear from the moment I was born that I would play the violin. With a violinist for a father and a pianist for a mother, music was part of our family’s daily life. Whilst at secondary school, I studied the violin at the conservatoire in Rome and attended courses in Baroque music during the summer. That is how I met Sigiswald Kuijken, Chiara Banchini and Lucy van Dael. They opened up a whole new world for me.
I soon moved to Paris and began working as a freelance violinist with all the newly formed Baroque orchestras, such as Sigiswald Kuijken’s ‘La Petite bande’, Jean Claude Malgoire’s ‘La Grande Écurie’, ‘l’Orchestre Baroque d’Île-de-France’, and William Christie’s ‘Les Arts Florissants’. There I became familiar with the entire major repertoire and developed a great love for opera and orchestral playing. Not long after, I was also invited to join the O18C, which enjoyed legendary status. The orchestra wasn’t so much ‘better’, but different.
There was a tremendous sense of solidarity and a mix of very strong personalities. It wasn’t just about how you made music, but also who you were as a person. In the string sections, everyone had a completely different way of playing. Yet there was a very clear shared vision of how it should sound. This individuality wasn’t penalised, but rather appreciated.
In the early years, we travelled around with the orchestra as if we were a rock band. To illustrate this, one day when we were very tired from travelling, there were 12 white limousines waiting to take us to the concert! There were always two busses: one for the smokers and one for the non-smokers. Frans Brüggen simply travelled with us on the bus. To me, this characterises how this orchestra functioned. There was no hierarchy, and conductors and soloists were always part of our greater whole.
After a few years, I received a letter in the post informing me that, from that moment on, I was a permanent member of the orchestra. I was over the moon. To this day, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century remains the place where I feel most at home.
