J.S.バッハ - スリー・オア・ワン

バッハ音楽を究め、自ら編曲を手がけたピアニストの愛があふれる一枚

ピアニストのフレッド・トーマスが18歳の時にロンドンの王立音楽院で出会ったヴァイオリニストのアイシャ・オラズバエヴァ、チェリストのルーシー・レイルトンとともに、バッハ音楽を自身の編曲で演奏したアルバムです。トーマスは現代音楽に傾倒していた二人をバッハ演奏に誘いました。「優しさだったり、面白さだったり、熱心さだったり、彼らの発する特別なオーラに惹かれ、ともに音楽を作ることを心から楽しみました」と語るトーマス。アルバムのほとんどを占めるバッハの『オルガン小曲集』について「作曲の専門書、楽器の教本、典礼用の作品集、宗教の書」である素晴らしい小品集とほめたたえています。バッハ音楽を究めるトーマスの愛があふれるアルバムです。
ユニバーサル・ミュージック/IMS

Three or One is, to paraphrase James Thurber, very much like nothing anyone has heard before. It consists of arrangements by pianist Fred Thomas of short chorale-based works for piano solo or for piano accompanied by violin (Aisha Orazbayeva) and cello (Lucy Railton). Many of the originals are from the Orgelbuchlein, while others come from cantatas or other chorale elaborations. Of course, Bach has been arranged, as Thomas points out, for any number of instrumental combinations, even for piano trio or for others that Bach could never have imagined. Anthologies of short Bach pieces are common enough, for one of the joys of Bachs music is the dizzying complexity with which he can invest even brief, formally simple pieces, but neither of these precedents gets to the uniqueness of Thomas work here. He puts it this way in his notes: Many of my trio transcriptions deploy techniques that separate the voices and avoid the typical blending and blurring of the organ in a church. He interprets Bach in terms of Affekt and rhetoric, and one need not know anything about Baroque-era rhetorical figures to hear what this means. Consider the tiny Wenn wir in hochsten Noten sein, BWV Anh. II 78, with its strikingly odd articulation of the rumbling walking bass line in the piano. Often the arrangements have the effect of atomizing Bachs line, separating them clearly so as to reveal the character of each one. The effect is, by turns, lyrical and haunting. Its hard to know what Bach would have thought of it, but it does seem to reveal deep secrets in the music, and it is, well, very much like nothing anyone has heard before. The music sometimes has an effect as if it came from a non-Western tradition. A key contributor is ECM label head Manfred Eicher, who sequenced the pieces highly effectively and set the performance in a hall at the University of Huddersfield that has just the right mystique.