Bach: Italienischer gusto

Album review

Many listeners may be puzzled by the tracklist for this Italian release, containing previously unfamiliar concertos by J.S. Bach. In fact, all of them are arrangements, running from alternate versions that are generally agreed to have existed and to have been Bach's own originals of pieces better known in another form (the last two works on the program) to purely speculative hypotheses. The chief example of the latter is the album's title track, the "Concerto nach italienischem Gusto," better known as the Italian Concerto, BWV 971, and one of Bach's most familiar works for solo keyboard. Part of what makes the piece so compelling is Bach's ingenuity in transferring details of Vivaldian string writing to the keyboard. But it's certainly true that Bach wouldn't have hesitated to make a version for strings if he had happened to need one, and the small (basically one instrument per part) ensemble Insieme Strumentale di Roma is not the first to perform the work this way. An available version by violinist/conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini turns the Italian Concerto into a concerto for violin and orchestra. The distinctive quality of the version here is that the piece is made instead into a sort of concerto grosso, with solos bouncing around the membership of the ensemble. This isn't wholly successful. With such a small group, the boundary between solo and tutti isn't clear, and things aren't helped by murky church sound. The overall effect resembles that of musicians warming up in a church, with disconnected fragments of music floating in the air. The other pieces are a mixed bag. The Concerto in D minor for violin, strings, and continuo (tracks 1-3), with the puzzling catalog listing of BWV 1059, 35, and 12, and the Concerto in D minor for organ, strings, and continuo, BWV 1053, 49, and 169, are works assembled from various library fragments. This is clearly not a must-have for the average Bach listener, and the disc's orientation toward specialists is made clear by the use of the unspelled and unexplained acronym NBA (Neue Bach Ausgabe, or New Bach Edition, not National Basketball Association). Yet despite inferior sound the disc is listenable for general audiences. There's nothing here that Bach himself wouldn't at least have thought about doing, and the historical-instrument performances of these young players have the zip and the organic feeling that have marked the many fine performances of Baroque music issuing from Italy in recent years.
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