 Le très intéressant texte de présentation de ce disque met l’accent sur deux spécificités de Jean-Sébastien Bach, une attention toute particulière à la facture musicale de son époque, ainsi que la pratique de la « parodie », une permanente réécriture d’œuvres anciennes pour les adapter aux nouveaux instruments de son temps. Nous découvrons ainsi un florilège d’œuvres, interprétées sur 4 instruments différents, orgue, clavecin et beaucoup plus rares, piano Cristofori et clavicorde. Les instruments sont très bien captés, bien que les prises de son s’étalent sur 10 ans ; on peut simplement regretter la nécessité d’ajuster le volume sonore des différentes plages, sous peine d’entendre le clavicorde sonner avec la même ampleur que l’orgue d’église. Bien que l’intérêt soit constamment renouvelé d’une œuvre à l’autre, les plages les plus passionnantes sont celles dévolues au clavicorde. On y entend en effet deux des célébrissimes sonates et partitas pour violon seul, dans une version que Bach interprétait lui-même. Le brillant et la virtuosité du violon s’effacent ici au profit d’une lecture intimiste et pleine d’émotion. (Denis Jarrin) In 1982 an extremely interesting little book appeared, published by Rusconi, entitled La nuova immagine di J.S. Bach (The New J.S. Bach Image) which, in the intentions of its author, the brilliant, stormy, feared, contested but always great Piero Buscaroli, should be the introduction to the Italian edition of Karl Geiringer’s Bach. Storia di una dinastia musicale (Rusconi, 1981), which in writing “expanded” until it acquired the proportions of an independent essay which was then published in this form (with the blessing of Geiringer himself). Susequently Buscaroli honoured the tricentenary of Bach’s birth with his powerful biography, which is still considered a cornerstone of Bach literature in Italian, alas little known outside Italy, with the exception of a citation in the preface to Bach by Malcolm Boyd who, with Denis Arnold, was one of the few foreign academics to take the work of Buscaroli seriously. The German public would have run the “risk” of being pleasantly shaken by the “earthquake” of an absolutely unortodox biography, outside the venerable Bach tradition, if it had not been for zeal of the publishers Schott and Breitkopf & Härtel, who described it, in their wisdom, as “not yet ready” to experience the delights of the prose of “Piero il Terribile” and thus rejected the proposal of translation. [...] In this attempted statement of the Neues-Bach-Bild, among “scientific” writings and theses which are practically crime novels, we have identified three incredibly virgin areas of research and investigation which we would like to highlight : Bach’s relationship with the piano. In particular, the instruments built by Bartolomeo Cristofori and by Gottfried Silbermann. The “youthful” works for the organ (“experiments”, transcriptions and first masterpieces). The clavicord execution of the sonatas and partitas “for solo violin” according to the original sources and, more generally, the consideration of works for the violin, cello and flute as true exercises in high composition, reductio ad unum, where the impossibility of a second voice makes the individual line melodic (albeit broken by chords or arpeggios where the instrumental technique allows), the single vehicle of the three formative elements of music: harmony, rhythm, and melody.
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