Playing Bach on a solo flute, with the instrument’s limitations and the fragility of its sound, seems to me in a sense to be the opposite of the perfection that defines Bach’s music. But perhaps it is precisely between the instrument’s fragility and the music’s perfection that the arc is drawn — a rainbow-bridge between the divine and the human.

How does one play on flute a work written originally for cello? During my time with Covid, I played through the cello suites. I spent a great deal of time with the E-flat major Suite and it taught me to listen more deeply, to seek solutions and explore harmonic and melodic relationships in ways I had never experienced before. Gradually, I began performing it wherever people would listen-concert halls, churches, gardens, homeless shelters—and eventually I felt that my version of the E-Flat major suite had developed a voice of its own. I see this version more as a stage in an ongoing process – one that nonetheless embraces the full responsibility and stakes of transcription, allowing the work’s inner possibilities and features to emerge in a new light.

It is a special gift that, just a few weeks after the recording, I had the opportunity to walk along a pilgrimage route in Japan, a path that has not been abandoned for a thousand years. The photos were taken there. And the voices of Buddhist monks greeting the sunset with their conch shells and the Abandoned Path …, or the roar of the mountain stream and the Courante never forget each other.
Two kinds of infinity – or are they two faces of the same infinity: the power of the eternally roaring stream and the rising, hovering mist?

Anna Rákóczy – flute