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 ...
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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...
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