Johann Sebastian Bach
Concerts Avec Plusieurs Instruments - III

Of Johann Sebastian Bach today, perhaps, we would say that he sold himself to the highest bidder. Because, objectively, that was the case, as he wandered for thirty years through half of Germany in search of the most enlightened patron, the highest pay, and the most exalted role. This fact should not be wrongly or maliciously interpreted: we are in the 16th century, and at the time it was, and would remain for much longer, a practice absolutely common among musicians of the era, who by traveling between European courts and dioceses could acquire more stimuli, suggestions, and material to improve their art (not to mention the fact that they could circulate their name and perhaps find increasingly prestigious positions).

The division into periods in Bach's music is as clear as Picasso's in painting: depending on where he worked, the type of commission, and the master directing him, the musician produced works that were entirely distinguishable from each other; as with Picasso (who was a genius from his earliest sketches), however, it was not just a qualitative evolution but rather a true change of direction that Bach (who was a genius from his first staves) faced every time he encountered a different audience and purpose to which to devote his art. So, for example, the Weimar period, when Bach was a court organist, is when he produced most of his works for organ, or during his time in Leipzig, where he left us religious masses and cantatas since there Bach was the choirmaster of a church, and so on. During his stay in Köthen, Bach found a prince who allowed him to indulge in secular concert music (at the time almost exclusively of Italian origin): those six industrious years produced some of the most absolutely ingenious compositions in the entire history of music.

To pay homage to the staggering beauty of Bach's concerted music, the ensemble Café Zimmermann decided to record all the music that the German musician dedicated to this genre in the best possible way. The group turned to the very chic Parisian label Alpha, which fully supported the idea by financing the entire project (now up to the fourth CD, but not yet completed) entitled "Concerts avec plusieurs instruments," precisely as Bach referred to his mult-instrumental concerts. Café Zimmerman is a heterogeneous group of people from all over: the small orchestra is led by the Argentine first violin and konzertmeister Pablo Valetti and the French harpsichordist Céline Frisch, but among the ranks, there are also German, Polish, and English players, the Italian flutist Diana Baroni, and others; a truly multicultural orchestra. These musicians, whose skill is almost moving, approached Bach in the most philologically pure way possible: they gathered all the material from the Köthen period, reordered it chronologically, studied it thoroughly, deeply understood it, and performed it with original instruments from the era or, in the absence of such, with perfect copies in form and sound. The final result is beyond a shadow of a doubt one of the most important projects in the field of "classical" music* of the 2000s (if not the most important), and one of the highest achievements in performance quality in the history of Bach recordings, perhaps the very highest for this part of his repertoire. It should be noted that the material they worked on is universally considered brilliant, rightly so, the victory the ensemble achieved lies in the astonishing quality of their performance, which decidedly leaves a precedent in this field.

Despite the highly sought-after adherence to the original score and the will for the greatest possible detachment from their own interpretative intents, there is no coldness in these records: everything is smooth, well blended, gentle. The fourth "Brandenburg Concerto BWV 1049" is quite simply a masterpiece executed as best as it could be, the "Concerto for oboe d'amore BWV 1053R" is exceptionally sweet, the "Concerto for three harpsichords BWV 1064" captivates with its nearly soundtrack-like pathos, and the well-known "Suite no. 2 BWV 1067"(the one that ends with the famous "Badinerie") resonates as bright as ever. Another important favorable point of the record lies in the fact that the Café Zimmerman is not a large orchestra (as was usually assembled in the past for this), but an ensemble of a dozen elements... just like the ensemble Bach had at his disposal at the time. The great technical skill of all the musicians allowed them to push a bit on the accelerator, slightly speeding up the execution compared to tradition, and this too is a move studied at the drawing board in a philological manner since we know that Bach loved very fast tempos. Perhaps the very best, however, Café Zimmerman reserves for the virtuoso parts: more than Frisch, it is the great Valetti who astounds with the versatility of his violin, and precisely (to pinpoint the jewel of the album) in the third movement of the "Brandenburg Concerto"(an exceptional fusion of the three voices violin/continuo/flute) the Argentine leaves us with the most astonishingly perfect execution ever heard of what are perhaps the 40 most beautiful seconds in the history of music, with a soundline that goes up and down more and more furiously, fast and closely until creating a sort of hypnotic effect.

The newspaper Le Monde writes: «The ensemble is magnificent for dynamics, expression, and phrasing. Everything is simultaneously lively and agitated, free yet perfectly controlled, simple yet terribly sophisticated». It is right: in the third volume of the series, comprising works from the fourth Brandenburg Concerto to the second Orchestral Suite (fundamentally, therefore, a good chunk of the best-known Bach production), the mastery of the musicians reaches levels of unexpected perfection. The worldwide criticism has awarded these recordings with stars upon stars, "album of the year" ribbons, enthusiastic reviews, and grand celebrations, and all is perfectly deserved: listening to these CDs today has a bit of the effect that Glenn Gould's "Goldberg Variations" must have had years ago, namely of totally reconsidering music that is more than known in a totally different perspective, absolutely modern, completely contemporary, and still today able to surprise and offer amusing, sad, moving, and peaceful suggestions at the same time. Contrary to Gould, however, who put a lot of himself into Bach, the work done by the Café Zimmerman is commendable for technical perfection, sound clarity, and executional correctness: in the hands of these expert musicians, Bach returns to being Bach and not of the musicians of the moment who tackle, some better and some worse, the precious material left to us by the German.

* = The term "classical music" means absolutely nothing, but here it is used in the common sense, that is to indicate all that music written from the Middle Ages to today's art music (and it is therefore evident that in seven centuries there could not have been a single monogenre).