Bach on the Edge. A Selection of Harpsichord Works

A vocation for experimentation was unquestionably an essential component of Bach’s mindset. It was a desire to surpass, in every possible respect, whatever had been achieved up until then in a given genre or musical form, while extending to the utmost the resources and technical capabilities of individual instruments and the human voice (and thus also of individual performers). All of which was to be accomplished in the search for a perfection that is both aesthetic and spiritual.

This ceaseless aspiration – cultivated from the beginning to the very end of his life – to go beyond the limits shapes the works selected for the second solo album by harpsichordist Cristiano Gaudio, whose debut recording was awarded a Diapason d’Or and Classica’s Choc de l’Année. From the dazzling virtuosity of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue to the contrapuntal complexity of the Ricercare a 6 from The Musical Offering; from the art of transcription, magnified in the arrangement of the Violin Sonata no. 2 to the “twelve-tone” last fugue of The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, whose subject exceptionally includes all the notes of the chromatic scale – all these works embody that bold erosion of the limits that Bach’s music pursued as its true mission, thereby giving both performers and listeners, for over three centuries, the thrill of an intellectual adventure – indeed even a physical experience – that is constantly on the edge.

Cristiano Gaudio – harpsichord