A landmark in Bach discography
A musician and poet on Mount Everest - Insanely good, a legitimate successor to Glenn Gould
In opera, one speaks of threshold fear in part of the potential audience, because they do not dare to take the decisive step due to imagined stiffness and stockiness. But even in classical music, there are works that drag such a towering aura before them that respect not infrequently tips over into distance. This was the case with Bach's "Art of the Fugue", at least for me personally. There, compositional brilliance, metaphysical-spirituality and a peculiar brittleness mix into a climbing path that is not easy to overcome. Every mountain expert can consider himself lucky to know his limits. Where courage is added, the next level of difficulty can be tackled with an experienced guide.
For me, the 26-year-old Filippo Gorini from Bergamo is such an expert tracker in the most extreme weather conditions, who not only enchants the listener with his sensual playing despite all the contrapuntal intricacies, but also heaves him over all the cliffs of the score by means of poetic power.
"The triumphs of intellect and art, the symbols and layers of meaning hidden in the conception of this work form a unity with the vocal lines that are its very heart. Those who think of it only as a theoretical marvel are wrong: as the counterpoints and canons grow in formal complexity, so does the emotional tension, right up to the heartbreaking mystery of the unfinished Fuga XIV." This confession already says a great deal about the pianist's incredible ability to balance the vocal gestures of the horizontal melodic arcs with the mathematically conceived vertical stratifications.
Gorini's technical bravura mixes with a precise touch as well as a gift for keeping the thread comprehensible in the most complex contrapuntal weaving. But not only that. In order to illustrate the music, it was a concern of the multi-talented Italian to precede all counterpoints and canons of the "Art of Fugue" with lyrical word preludes. Thus, parallel to the recordings, a cycle of sonnets and haikus in English, inspired by T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets", was created, which are also available in an excellent German translation.
In this way Filippo Gorini wants to avoid the danger of considering Bach's "Art of Fugue" once again only as a "monument of the past". For this reason, he has also documented on his own web project page www.TheArtOfFugueExplored.com conversations with composers, musicians, visual artists, architects, mathematicians, directors and dancers who comment on Bach. The website cited also includes detailed explanations of the poems.
The beautiful album is a landmark in the Bach discography. Gorini brings archaic into our time, confidently, multilayered, uninhibitedly natural, with the voice of one who transposes cosmic loneliness into lucid experience. And does not entrench himself in an ivory tower, but enters into an open cross-genre conversation with his audience. Stupendous!