Bach: The Musical Offering BWV 1079
Among so many recordings already of Bach's late chamber music, this recording offers some subtle details coupled with technical gifts when it comes to the trio sonata, central to this collection of music featuring a theme borrowed from Frederick the Great.
It was by chance that I came across this new recording (by way of Qobuz/Roon) of Bach’s Musical Offering, BWV 1079, by none other than Ensemble Diderot. (I’ll rant later about how difficult it is to find a fully comprehensive listing of new albums added to this service; as Apple’s new classical platform has launched, I found a work around to view their new releases then look them up via Qobuz, which is not how this is supposed to work!) Unusual is that no booklet was provided with this streaming release which therefore provides no insight into the ensemble’s choice to record this already well-recorded work. However, aside from a prodigious catalog already, the ensemble seems focused on recording chamber music unfamiliar to a lot of us, next to some of the same works recorded by Musica Antiqua Köln, with whom we know shares a connection to this ensemble by way of its founder’s relationship with violinist and leader Johannes Pramsohler.
I commit to someday hearing these musicians in person. I had planned to be in Italy this past fall and see Ensemble Diderot perform at Monteverdi, an arts-focused resort in Tuscany. Health concerns kept me home. The group’s dedication to high quality recordings continues with this release. And it’s the one MAK album I have not auditioned in any complete sense; while a reissue was once coupled with BWV 1080, the edition I own did not include this work.
For those unfamiliar, this work was written at Bach’s will for Frederick the Great after a visit to Potsdam. He had it printed at his expense and presented and we don’t know what the flute-playing leader thought of the gift. Or, likewise, we don’t know how sensitive Bach was to the Frederick’s own taste for far more galante music. The trio sonata, which in this recording closes the album, is written in a far more foward-leaning taste.
The meat of this work is the trio sonata and the 3-part and 6-part ricercars. The canons are presented as puzzles, further demonstrations of Bach’s contrapuntal art using the highly chromatic theme provided by Frederick during Bach’s visit. They are puzzles because the fully-developed solutions are not worked out; this presentation is why every ensemble typically plays these in different ways, at least when it comes to where one should end.
My reference for this recording is the one by Ensemble Sonnerie, which took some of these solutions to interesting places, using a menagerie of colorful instruments to realize the canons in particular; they also realize the 6-part ricercar, the main ask of Frederick, in full instrumental technicolor, well, short of Webern’s solution, of course. Bach does ask the holder of the score to seek to find the solutions.
Ensemble Diderot in this recording adopt a more traditional interpretation, sticking to the instrumentarium demanded by Bach with flute, violins, and the harpsichord (over the fortepiano, which is sometimes used considering Frederick’s ownership of Silbermann pianos).
Both of the fugues, proper, are performed presumably by Philippe Grisvard. I feel he adopts a tempo in the 6-part work that treats the piece with some gravitas, given the ask to present a six-voiced fugue for two hands. It’s an interesting testament (the piece, not the performance in particular) to someone who carried great prestige in German society during Bach’s time to engage with a musician with a challenge. One wonders who really challenged Bach across his life, as a composer. Something tells me he was likely his own worst enemy in life, creating music to his own high level of perfection for the service of God. Here was a more mortal figure asking something of Bach and whatever he personally thought of his son’s employer, he answered the call with dexterity and polish. One can only imagine him rushing home to set about to write out the solution to the six-part work after failing to adequately improvise one in the king’s presence.
Ton Koopman in his more recent recording of the work (Challenge Classics) presents the 6-part ricercar twice; the rendition for solo harpsichord is faster than the instrumental arrangement and is paced just over two minutes shorter than Grisvard’s. Koopman’s playing is not everyone’s tea, but for me his reading of the ricercar is the highest example of art on record for this particular movement; the use of so many trills and ornaments is also a matter for debate, but in its uniqueness I found my disfigured pearl with some extraordinary beauty.
Ensemble Diderot however attend to fast tempi in their recording of the trio sonata. The opening movement (of four, slow/fast/slow/fast) is pushing along but we notice right out of the gate a cohesive but different read on the performance of some of the ornaments. I can’t speak to the treatment of what I believe are written as appogituras as graces but I’m guessing they are trying to make the piece sound more galante than baroque in style.
This unique perspective in the way they treat the graces for me is this ensemble’s disfigured pearl; again one that promotes the beauty of the music.
In the second movement all three voices, basso continuo, violin, and flute play with a pretty even articulation across the phrases, again, which is a little different than how most period ensembles play this trio sonata. I can’t speculate as to why the articulation comes across so consistently like this in each line, but their consistent approach does promote a certain freshness to the piece that kept me on my toes, listening to what’s now a very familiar piece.
As we might by this point expect, Pramsohler and colleagues are technically adept musicians and they don’t disappoint anywhere on this album with their strong technical acumen, which is all the more challenging when a tempo is pushed.
I had to hunt, but I did find the trio sonata performed by Goebel and musicians from a comprehensive compilation collection on Qobuz. I anticipated Ensemble Diderot taking nearly ideal tempi but that is not the case. The opening by MAK is far slower, which I think is an appropriate choice given the tempo marking, but I ultimately prefer Pramsohler’s interpretation of the first movement. The second movement reveals the same treatment with a faster tempo. Surprising, perhaps to me, but it is not particularly important. It’s one of the few recordings featuring Goebel and Hazelzet where I felt the flutist had one over the violinist; in Pramsohler’s recording I feel the violin and flute are more equal partners on surer footing, bettering the interpretation put to record by a mentor over forty years ago.
Again, not the most pressing comparison, but likely of interest to those who nerd out on musical lineage and trying to identify the influences musicians and their recordings have on others.
The final Allegro by Ensemble Diderot is a display of solid rhythmic sure-footing; the cello and harpsichord play lock-step as one providing a toe-tap-inspiring bass line for the violin and flute to both fit into like tight puzzle pieces. There’s a nail-biting portion at around 2-minutes in for me, in every performance, quite an exercise for the violinist, before the challenge is pushed off to the flute.
In this case, bravo!
