Phantasm - J.S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Consort – II - All Music

This recording is the second of a pair containing music by Bach arranged for viol consort by the group Phantasm and its director, Laurence Dreyfus. The arguments applied to the first album in the pair might be repeated here. Pro: Bach thought nothing of arranging his music for new combinations, even more so as he grew older, and this, unlike the efforts of his contemporaries, sometimes involved keyboard music (although the keyboard-to-ensemble direction not so much). Con: Hearing these transcriptions would have made little sense to Bach, who lived decades and hundreds of kilometers away from the English heartland of viol consort music. Pro: The Well-Tempered Clavier and the other pieces on these albums have counterpoint as their most important feature and, over his career, Bach purified this element to the point where his final work, The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, was in a sense an abstract work with no specified instrumentation; viol consort music is an intensely polyphonic genre. Probably the best way to regard Phantasm's performances is to say that hearing them is something like hearing Bach's music transposed to an alien culture. In no way is it authentic, and it may not even be true to the music, but it is undeniably intriguing. There are differences between the two albums. The first contains various keyboard works, while this one is restricted to The Well-Tempered Clavier (both books, mixed together); the first makes a more varied impression. On the other hand, the acoustic from Magdalen College, Oxford, on this release is a bit more in the spirit of the music than the vast spaces of Berlin's Jesus-Christus-Kirche on the earlier album; viol consort music carries overtones of inwardness and contemplation. Which, of course, Bach's often did as well, and that's the strongest argument in favor of this unusual release.