Bach may have worked like a sleepless head, but he sometimes used his musical ideas in musical circumstances. Always attentive to the play of music as much as of spirit, our dear Cantor attributed his motifs to other instruments. The trio, which is aptly named “The Aesthetic Curiosities,” offers a disc of three sonatas transposed by the composer – when he was still a young man seeking innovations. “We chose instruments that Bach encountered the makers,” explains Jean-Pierre Pinet in the accompanying notice to this album, who plays the baroque flute called the traverso. “Their sounds, undoubtedly, were shaped in Dresden in the year 1725. The copies we have carry the memory of their prestigious models. We insisted on this: in Bach’s music, the psychology of timbres takes a predominant place.”
A Gift
Don’t believe in some archaeological work. Such a recording presents itself above all as a gift. A gift of gentleness, a gift of travel through time, a gift of sonic landscape. Of course, it is allowed to project this friendly dialogue into our present: faced with the harshness of the world, doesn’t this lightness of timbres and natural gaiety offer reasons to maintain hope? But it is also allowed to dream that this sensitive machine invites us to some dream of yesteryear. Listening to “The Aesthetic Curiosities,” music lovers and novices will have a happy time.
Johann Sebastian Bach. Trio Sonatas after BWV 1027, 1028, and 1029, The Aesthetic Curiosities, En Phases label.
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