J.S. Bach / Salzburg Chamber Soloists/ Schluren - Die Kunst Der Fuge

This 'Triple Completion' of Johann Sebastian Bach's 'Art of Fugue', performed by the Salzburg Chamber Soloists under Christoph Schlüren for Aldilà Records, is a pioneering enterprise: For the first time the final fugue is presented both in it's unfinished original form and in three completions, each of which hypothetically completes the composer's architectonic plan. The first album presents the eleven consecutive main fugues and the unfinished final fugue with the concluding chorale. The second album of this double set opens with the two four-part mirror fugues, and continues with five later composers joining Bach: with the three 'completers' of the final fugues: Donald Francis Tovey (1931), Karl Hermann Pillney (1937) and Kalevi Aho (2011); and with two fugues on the B-A-C-H theme by Robert Schumann (1845) and Reinhard Schwarz-Schiling (1985) that are used as connective interludes. The range of music that emerged directly from Bach's late work thus extends in this project from Romanticism via Expressionism to the present time. In the interest of a cantabile performance of the fugue style as an instrumental continuation of the classical vocal polyphony of the Renaissance and the early Baroque, the execution is entrusted exclusively to the color of the string instruments, in tempos derived from the tradition of the Musica sacra, predominantly solemn, and performed as choral-like as possible, for Bach, as Marpurg wrote in his fugue treatise in 1753, wished to observe "a noble and melodious simplicity" and "a cantabile manner of playing" in his 'Art of Fugue'.