For her new recording, entitled Or (light), Franco-American cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton presents arrangements of works by Couperin and Vivaldi. The album begins with the first and third of Couperin’s Leçons de ténèbres — the Lamentations of Jeremiah, originally scored for soprano and continuo. Wieder-Atherton says, “I had long been looking for an instrument that could accompany my cello in the uninterrupted singing that is the first Leçon. One day, almost by chance, I heard the sound I sought. A sound that came out of the mist: an MS20 monophonic synthesizer played by Marius Atherton. I could hear the vibration of lives in danger in these layers of sound.” For the third Leçon, a setting for two sopranos, the cellist “twinned” the voices by multitracking herself, and Marius Atherton accompanies that setting on electric guitar. The final third of the album turns to a set of extracts by Vivaldi selected by Wieder-Atherton from his operas and violin concertos. The cellist has arranged the set for what she calls “a polyphony of cellos to accompany the solo parts,” and percussionist Mahut is also featured on these last arrangements, as is Nicolas Worms on synthesizer.