Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
L'Art de la Fugue, BWV 1080 (version et instrumentation de Hermann Scherchen, 1963)

Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto
Marco Angius, direction

In the course of the twentieth century, various composers confronted against Bach’s genius in more or less occasional transcriptions/elaborations/paraphrases; the Art of Fugue seems to lend itself, by its open conceptual and instrumental abstraction, to this kind of test, since it continues to elicit answers in following generations from Busoni (Fantasia contrappuntistica, 1912) to Franco Donatoni (L’arte della fuga, Contrappunti I-XIV, 1992-97) and Luciano Berio (the latter headed a collective project of the Teatro Sperimentale di Spoleto in 2001). The renewed reading of this timeless masterpiece, compared to an approach with ancient instruments, starts from the premise that the past is neither achievable nor restorable by any conservative restoration. The orchestral version of The Art of Fugue by Bach made by Hermann Scherchen in 1963 is an atypical project engaging the famous Berlin conductor for many years, until the last video-recording in Toronto in 1965, only a few months before his death. With the demise of philological fashions, this experiment, so unusual, again takes on all its authenticity and innovative importance. The Art of Fugue, the interrupted testament of Johann Sebastian Bach, is an open geometric requiem which, by a strange destiny, became also for Scherchen a sort of personal artistic testament.