Toucher Bach

Dear music-lover,

we are delighted to see your interest in this recording of J. S. Bach’s flute sonatas with obbligato harpsichord. It may seem surprising that we decided to present these particular works, given the wealth of existing recordings, but we believe we have very good reasons for doing so.

Most importantly, there is my strong personal attachment to these pieces: this led me to decide, together with Anne-Catherine, that they should be re-imagined, at least in part; such a procedure can work especially well with only a small number of players involved.

I have always been fascinated by Bach’s flute sonatas; they have always provided a measure of my abilities in terms of sound, style, expression, and ensemble. I have had very different experiences with the sonatas on many occasions, so it was a great pleasure for me to study the sonatas once again at a fundamental level. I then spent a great deal of time working through the various ideas that occurred to me during this process: these were fundamentally related to interpretation, but also included such external concerns as the choice of instrument, the pitch used, the completion of a work (BWV 1032) and the reconstruction of others (BWV 525a and BWV 1031). All of these factors influenced our choice of title in their own way.

Toucher Bach: for us this means working towards the inner core of the music, towards the mutually supportive network of voices that ensures the stability of the counterpoint in an artistic form. Great architectural masterpieces have done the same for thousands of years: the columns of the ancient Egyptians, the facades of the Rococo period and the shapes designed by Zaha Hadid cause even monumental buildings to appear in an alternative aggregate state that is both alive and flowing.

Leonard Schelb