Bach, J.S.: The Complete Keyboard Concertos (Johann Sebastian Bach)

Chronique

A French review reprinted in the booklet for this live release notes that "Baroque purists would have found plenty of reasons to be up in arms" about the Bach performances by the Luxembourgeois pianist and conductor Francesco Tristano Schlimé recorded here. But anyone expecting an old-fashioned piano-and-orchestra Bach recording as still done by big-name pianists and symphony orchestras would be equally nonplussed. These recordings of Bach's keyboard concertos resemble none other that have ever been made, not even those of Glenn Gould, of whom Schlimé styles himself a disciple. They are, however, just about as startling as Gould's must have been in the 1950s, when they first began to appear. The most distinctive feature of Schlimé's readings is their jazz influence, manifested not so much in rhythmic alterations (which are present but extremely subtle) or improvisatory components (which are more pervasive but still do not call attention to themselves), but in the keyboard articulation, seemingly produced with relaxed, flat fingers in the manner of a jazz player. The music has something of the feel of the Bach recordings by John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet, even though it is in no sense jazz. Schlimé expands on this idea with treatments that have a flexible, organic feel. He is aided by close coordination with his international group of handpicked New Bach Players, many of them his classmates at the Juilliard School in New York. Perhaps the pieces that work best are those in which Schlimé can use his unorthodox style to play with the balance between keyboard and orchestra; the Keyboard Concerto No. 7 in G minor, BWV 1058, with which Bach himself was apparently dissatisfied and which is often omitted from sets of this kind, or Keyboard Concerto No. 6 in F major, BWV 1057, in which the piano seems more comfortable taking over large stretches of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, BWV 1049 (most of these concertos are transcriptions). The entire relationship between the piano and orchestra is subtly altered in Schlimé's readings, in which the piano is much more prominent where it is simply playing the continuo part than a harpsichord would be; Schlimé here is again like the leader of a small jazz ensemble rather than a soloist set apart from a tutti. It's all quite a surprise, but it's well thought out in many details and is worth trying out if only for the shock of the new. The live recording at the superb Metz Arsenal is a strong point. Notes are in French, English, and Polish; this is a Polish release, with subsidies from various government and private sources.
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