专辑简介

Even in this day of transcendent technique, Bach’s music bristles with difficulty. A masterly performance is still something to aspire to, and to marvel at. The Gigues and Capriccio from the Partitas, the fugal sections from the toccatas and the B-flat major Prelude and Fugue all require a perfect finger technique, bell-like clarity in polyphonic playing, great precision in giving each note its full due, and an ability to project the form of the a piece amid a welter of detail. No doubt, Bach’s music reflects his own extraordinary virtuosity at the clavier, the organ and on the violin. Contemporary accounts speak of Bach’s “quick hand as more potent than Orpheus’s fingers” and note that his feet “move over the pedal-board as if they had wings.”

Andrew Violette has a deep affinity with Bach’s clavier and organ music and has been performing it since his youth. What distinguishes his performances is that they challenge, even alter, commonplace perceptions of time and mood. Extreme tempi coupled with a preternatural clarity of detail create a hallucinogenic world where short, fast pieces seem to last considerably longer than their performance times would suggest, while longer, slow pieces are telescoped, and flash by in a moment of subjective time.