Johann Sebastian Bach: The Well-Tempered Consort III in Bloomington, MN

The viol consort
Phantasm
and its director,
Laurence Dreyfus
, state their own justifications for their unorthodox treatment of
Bach
's keyboard music: "The composer's dense web of voices [gains] in clarity when a single viol player performs an individual part," and "a focus on the ever-changing ways
crafts relationships between voices sheds new light on the music's affective intentions." Listeners are apparently buying it, for this third and final installment of
transcribed for viol consort landed on classical best-seller charts in early 2023. It is true that
thought nothing of rearranging his music for new instruments, but the viol consort idea would have made little sense to him; he lived far from the centers of viol music in both space and time. Yet this way of playing
is strangely compelling. One might say that
purified his treatment of counterpoint as his career proceeded, to the point where his final work,
The Art of Fugue
, may have had no specified instrumentation at all. The performances here capture something of that purification.
's performances are in no way authentic, and they have the flavor of something alien to the music, but neither do they distract the listener. The intense focus on the counterpoint that
Dreyfus
and company are aiming at is achieved. This final volume includes not just pieces from the two
Well-Tempered Clavier books
but from the
Clavieruebung
, where
introduced some of his deepest ideas. The rabbit-hole feeling that marks a successful
performance is definitely here, even if not all listeners want to follow
down this path. ~ James Manheim