Bach - The Art of Fugue: Robert Simpson, Delmé SQ, Les Voix Humanes, Kimiko Ishizaka and The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

J.S.Bach - The Art of Fugue
Arr. Robert Simpson
The Delmé Quartet
Hyperion CDA67138 (2000)
Flac, cue, log, booklet














J.S.Bach - The Art of Fugue
Arranged for Viola da gamba quartet
Les Voix Humaines
ATMA Classique ACD2 2645 (2015)
Digital download, tracks, booklet















The Obituary Bach Wrote for Himself
By STEVE SMITH
DEC. 8, 2007


More than 250 years after Bach’s “Art of Fugue” was posthumously printed, the work still poses questions that have only conditional answers. Was this unfinished collection of 20 increasingly complex fugues and canons meant to sum up a life’s work? Probably, given Bach’s failing eyesight during the 1740s.
Was it actually meant to be played? If so, by whom? Those are tougher questions. Bach’s score does not specify instrumentation. Some scholars view it as unquestionably a keyboard piece; others claim the opposite. The work has been successfully recorded by keyboardists (on both period and modern instruments), viol consorts, chamber orchestras and saxophone quartets.
On Tuesday night the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center opened its second Baroque Festival — an event devised to provide context for its traditional December traversals of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos — with a performance of “The Art of Fugue” at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The Orion String Quartet and the wind quintet Windscape, nine of the finest musicians on the society’s roster, used an arrangement made in the early 1960s by the flutist Samuel Baron for the New York Woodwind Quintet, of which he was a member, and the Fine Arts Quartet.
This concert was as much a tribute to Mr. Baron’s ingenuity as to Bach’s original vision, whatever it might have been. Mr. Baron’s combinations of modern strings and winds, however “inauthentic,” served the work with unfailing musicality.
True, the first 11 fugues felt more illustrative than inspirational. The music unfurled at a stately pace and, for the most part, a comfortable mezzo forte volume. Mr. Baron’s instrumental combinations illuminated Bach’s supreme logic as melodic strands mingled at varying angles.
After an intermission the players applied more expressiveness and dynamic gumption in the canons, and the performance grew more involving. An almost Romantic sense of tension accumulated as lines shifted restlessly from one instrumental grouping to another. Approaching the end, the music took on an almost orchestral density.
Bach didn’t complete the grandiose four-part final fugue, which was meant to culminate in a theme based on the letters of his name (B flat, A, C and B natural, in German parlance). Mr. Baron’s arrangement stopped short where Bach’s score trailed off, and the momentary silence was wrenching. The performance concluded with a chorale Bach had originally composed 30 years earlier, “I Come Before Thy Throne,” which he dictated again to a scribe as his own end approached.