Bach: Recomposed

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2023-10-27

Label: FANCYMUSIC

Music is like the art of memory (Ars Memoria), traveling through spaces of time.

Bach: recomposed will bring together three ways to work with memory.

Musical offering:

Alexander Nemtin (1936-1999) devoted his life to the reconstruction of the grandiose “Preliminary Action” by A.N. Scriabin, preserved in sketches. Canon perpetuus on the enigmatic Thema Regium is one of the movements of his Organ Concerto Op.10 (1968). The melody developed in detail by Bach receives a modern sampling in the riddle of a new endless canon; After almost three centuries, the theme - like a ray - is reflected in a magic mirror.

The Art of Fugue:

Zoltan Gönc (*1958) accomplished a feat comparable to the discoveries of linguists who were able to decipher the writing of ancient peoples. Just as the sculptor Gerasimov recreated the appearance of a person from surviving fragments, or how we use genome decoding and Big Data, operating with what has become, changing our ideas about the past = the past itself, Göncz solved the greatest mystery in the history of music in 15 years of work , recreating the Last counterpoint existing in the passage in the form of a Quadruple Fugue, based on the mathematical model of the “permutation matrix” he discovered in the work.

Chaconne:

Boris Filanovsky (*1968) thinks of his version of Bach's Chaconne (2022) not as a romantic transcription or modern deconstruction, but as another method of working with memory - recomposition. He managed to avoid contradictions with the Letter and the Spirit and developed the rich manual texture of the work in comparison with the violin original, according to the composer, “as if Bach had written it for the organ,” doing this with such natural right that it is difficult to think about the degree of approximation to invariant.

The two opening tracks are performed on a modern organ. The chaconne is implemented with such changes in sound and playing techniques as if it were performed on a Bach instrument. The second half of the album was played on the organ of the Finnish workshop Martti Porthan in St. Petersburg, which has its prototype as a monument organ by Gottfried Silbermann in Pönitz, Thuringia (1737). So we take another trip through time - Nemtin’s modern opus goes back to the past to sound in a baroque gestalt, and Göncz’s reconstruction receives an embodiment authentic to Bach’s writing.

Daniil Protsyuk