Bach Sonatas for Viola da Gamba

A curiously unmusical experience almost from the beginning

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Johann Sebastian Bach

Genre:

Chamber

Label: Zig-Zag Territoires

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 56

Mastering:

Stereo
DDD

Catalogue Number: ZZT070101

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
(3) Sonatas for Viola da gamba and Harpsichord Johann Sebastian Bach, Composer
Blandine Rannou, Harpsichord
Guido Balestracci, Viola da gamba
Johann Sebastian Bach, Composer
(6) Trio Sonatas, Movement: No. 4 in E minor, BWV528 Johann Sebastian Bach, Composer
Blandine Rannou, Harpsichord
Guido Balestracci, Viola da gamba
Johann Sebastian Bach, Composer
Musical sea-sickness pervades this curious recording of Bach’s mesmerising gamba sonatas. The opening bars augur well with the plangent reticence of the Adagio of the G major Sonata but after that Guido Balestracci enters into a musical rhetoric of striking incoherence. It revolves around a policy of pulling up – even stopping – at cadences, a mannerism which bafflingly truncates the phrasing and, at worst, does so when the musical logic suggests otherwise. Blandine Rannou soldiers on but the harpsichord is already so recessed as to establish her role as assuredly supporting.

There are a few moments of relieving ordinariness (such as in the gentle sequencing of the Trio, BWV528) but the great G minor Sonata – a kind of implied concerto – continues to harness the wrong points of interest; rather as in a fine monologue, the sense is distorted by an actor who fails to distinguish between poetic moment and syntactical necessity. The first movement gets slower and more ponderous as the cadences again become the catalyst for needless fragmentation.

The D major Sonata comes out least affected and there is the occasional moment of plausible phrasing, but throughout the gamba sounds decidedly short of the body, colour, bite and personality (odd, given how unrelentingly close is the sound) to convey these remarkable works with the eloquence they deserve. For all the natural facility, severe misjudgement underpins this disappointment.

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