Bach Les Fantaisies Padova - Str33984 - Stradivarius - Classical - Our Labels

Few pieces by Bach may boast such an immediate and uninterrupted popularity as the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue. Amongst the infinite reasons contributing to such success, is surely the extraordinary equilibrium between the sense of improvisation and of extemporisation – the aspect most given to pure fantasy – and a rigorous formal plan – which in turn favours the constructive and rational aspect. [...] If Bach himself often returned to work on this piece, so lending it a certain importance, the incredible quantity of more or less contemporary sources, and equalled by no other of the Thomaskantor’s works, shows how immediately it was loved, studied and admired. Bach experimented with a fortunate union of stile antico with concertante form), as well as the Fantasia duobus subjectis, a piece triple counterpoint which owes the name itself not, as many scholars maintain, to copyist errors (doubus instead of tribus), but to the fact the subjectum then defined what today is commonly called countersubject.