Listening to this album can be frustrating — the good items are so good that the frequent duds land with an especially loud thud.
Red Hot + Bach: Various Artists. Sony download or CD
The concept is an interesting one. The Red Hot Organization (RHO), which creates media and entertainment events to generate funds to fight Aids, commissioned a long list of musicians to create works in their own style using pieces by J.S. Bach as the point of departure.
This is met with varying degrees of success. The results range from straight-up transcriptions to departures so extreme that Bach himself would be hard-pressed to spot his work. Mandolinist Chris Thile, whose transcriptions of three of the solo violin sonatas and partitas for mandolin was one of last year’s best Bach programmes (we’re all waiting for the remaining three works) joins forces with guitarist and arranger Rob Moose on Minuet, to perform beautiful transcriptions from the keyboard Partita No.5 and Sarabande from the fifth French Suite. The two artists obviously know their Bach, both as listeners and as creative artists, and chose pieces ideally suited for such a recasting. The innovative use of digital media mentioned by the annotator is at
a minimum here, but the two selections are among the programme’s highlights.
The Kronos Quartet, which has been exploring new approaches to musical performance for decades, give us new versions of Contrapunctus II from The Art Of Fugue. The first, with the quartet joined by producer Jeff Mills, is about as interventionist as you can get, with the Bach piece thoroughly assimilated into a pulsating, scintillating electronic texture, rendering it unrecognisable (at least to me).
The piece, though, does flow with the logic and inevitability of the fugue from which it is derived, and comes into clearer focus with repeated listening. Toward the end of the programme, the Kronos Quartet reappears with a straight transcription of the same piece. Of course, all performances of The Art Of Fugue are transcriptions, as Bach indicated no scoring.
Although Bach composed melodies as expressive as any by Tchaikovsky or Puccini, they are never allowed to become saccharine or perfumed in the works in which they appear — although several of the arrangements here stray close to this kind of excess. Many of the numbers make lavish use of echoey electronic washes and creamy sonorities that emulsify Bach’s original ideas. Julianna Barwick’s Very Own, an electronic elaboration of the adagio movement from Bach’s Concerto In D Minor (BWV 974) — itself a transcription of an Alessandro Marcello concerto — gilds the lily of the music’s ravishing theme with overwhelming electronic confection.
I had an even harder time with King Britt and Pia Ercole’s Ave Maria, which takes the theme that Gounod inflicted on the Prelude In C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, sugaring it further with electronically doctored vocals by Ercole and a gloopy synthesiser accompaniment that does it no favours. Puffinsmilk, Jherek Bischoff’s rendition of the opening chorus from the St. John Passion, begins interestingly, but eventually drowns in sonic syrup.
But sometimes this high-calorie approach works nicely. Mia Doi Todd’s Jardim Do Amor, a take on the Prelude For Lute (BWV 999), comes outfitted with tremolo strings reminiscent of some of Jun Miyake’s numbers and vocals by the composer, overdubbing herself — very luscious sounds from beginning to end, but the music sustains it. Some purists will shudder, but others will relish it as a guilty pleasure.
Many Bach works mesh nicely with minimalist musical procedures, and some of the artists participating in this project were quick to put this affinity to work. Listen to how Dustin O’Halloran extends some of the repeated figures in Minim — the Prelude In C Minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier — to Reich- or Glass-like lengths, and to the stuck-in-a-groove passage toward the end of Om’Mas Keith’s take on the slow movement from the F minor keyboard Concerto No.5. Stuttering minimalist repeats infest Francesco Tristano and Carl Craig’s LudePre, so-called because the last bars of the Prelude In C Minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier are played straight before the beginning of the piece is extended.
I found the creative peaks of the programme to be Gary Bartz’s and Ron Carter’s jazz interpretation of the opening movement of Cello Suite No.1; Profuse 73’s Paul Jacobs Variations, an electronic melange in which scraps of a recording of the pianist playing what sounds like the Busoni transcription of Ich Ruf’ Zu Dir surface from time to time; and Pieter Nooten’s Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, a creative transcription for cello ensemble (evidently cellist Lucas Stam overdubbing himself) of the opening chorus of Cantata 12, music reused by Bach as the Crucifixus of Mass In B Minor.
I come to this album from the Bach-addict end of the spectrum. Listeners who are fans of the artists represented here may have a reaction to the music that is different from mine. One thing all buyers should know is that, as downloaded from iTunes, the track list of Red Hot + Bach includes 29 items, while the CD offered on Amazon lists only 19.
