Die Kunst Der Fuge - CD

Johann Sebastian Bach: Die Kunst Der Fuge version on 2CD in Standard edition. This particular edition was published in Austria in publishing company Gramola in cooperation with Aldilà Records on 20. March 2020.

The triple completion of Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Art of Fugue" by the Salzburg Chamber Soloists under Christoph Schlüren on Aldilà Records is a groundbreaking achievement: for the first time, the final fugue is presented both in its unfinished original form and in three completions, each of which hypothetically completes the composer's plan. The first CD presents eleven major fugues and an unfinished final fugue with a final chorale. The second CD of this double album opens with two four-movement fugues, after which Bach is joined by five later composers: three 'completers of the final fugue': Donald Francis Tovey (1931), Karl Hermann Pillney (1937) and Kalevi Aho (2011); and, with fugues on the theme of B-A-C-H inserted as intermezzi, Robert Schumann (1845) and Reinhard Schwarz-Schiling (1985). The spectrum of music based directly on Bach's late work thus extends through Romanticism and Expressionism to the present day. In the sense of the cantabile formation of the fugue style as an instrumental continuation of the classical vocal polyphony of the Renaissance and early Baroque (i.e. in the Ockeghem-Josquin-Palestrina-Frescobaldi-Bach line of development), the performance is entrusted exclusively to the timbre of the strings, in predominantly drawn-out tempi based on the tradition of musica sacra, to be performed as loudly as possible, since Bach, according to Marpurg in his 1753 textbook on fugue, wished to observe 'noble and singable simplicity' and 'a cantabile manner of playing' in his 'Art of Fugue'. "The Art of the Fugue is a meditation on the basic theme and the themes that are associated with it in various forms, to which the B-A-C-H theme is added at the end. The myth of "The Art of the Fugue" originated from the fact that the final fugue was the first unfinished piece to appear in print in 1751, a move so bold that it had to be muffled by the subsequently printed chorale "Vor deinen Thron tret' ich hiermit". The quality of the completion of the final fugue by the three later masters is reflected in whether the listener perceives where Bach's original ends, even if he does not know it, or whether he does not hear it, and whether the formation of the whole in what follows is satisfactory. For the 'triple completion' the most successful of the many attempts at completion were selected.

Album spans genres Classical, Baroque, Modernism, Romantic and Contemporary classical.