With this new release, Benjamin Alard adds two freshly authenticated works to his ambitious complete recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard music. Centred on two chaconnes recently restored to the Cantor, the French keyboard player continues his exploration of an instrumental world in which dance, variation and contrapuntal architecture come together in the same expressive concentration. 
By 
A new instalment in Benjamin Alard’s Bach complete edition for Harmonia mundi, this brief yet singular programme brings to light two works recently authenticated by the musicologist Peter Wollny: the Chaconne and Fugue in D minor BWV 1178 and the Chaconne in G minor BWV 1179. Their appearance in the Bach catalogue is almost a discreet event: not a spectacular rediscovery destined to overturn our image of the composer, but the precious addition of two fragments that, in subtle touches, shed light on his relationship with the keyboard, with dance and with continuous form.
The chaconne occupies a particular place in the Baroque imagination. Based on the repetition of a bass line or harmonic pattern, it offers the composer a framework that is both strict and infinitely open, ideally suited to variation, accumulation and metamorphosis. In Bach, this logic becomes a field of experimentation in which movement inherited from dance is transformed into learned construction. The Chaconne and Fugue BWV 1178, recorded on the harpsichord, thus seems to bring choreographic impetus into dialogue with contrapuntal density; the Chaconne BWV 1179, entrusted to an assembled set of clavichords with pedalboard, reveals another facet of this sound world, more inward, more fragile, almost meditative.
This release naturally forms part of the vast project undertaken by Benjamin Alard: to traverse the entirety of Bach’s keyboard works while taking seriously the diversity of instruments, practices and performance contexts. Here again, the choice of instrument is not a mere matter of colour. The harpsichord after Antoine Vater, for BWV 1178, and the assembled clavichords with pedalboard, for BWV 1179, open up two distinct listening spaces: one more articulated, theatrical and polyphonic; the other more intimate, attentive to the grain, vibration and breathing of the sound. The interest of this supplement therefore lies not only in its musicological novelty: it lies in the way these two pieces find their place within an ever more nuanced portrait of Bach at the keyboard. Through them, Benjamin Alard reminds us that a complete edition is not merely a matter of exhaustiveness: it is also a way of welcoming the unexpected, of allowing the margins, the additions and the works that have returned late to the light to be heard. Two barely exhumed chaconnes are enough, then, to reopen a world: that of a Bach in whom the rigour of form never prevents movement, dance or mystery.
You must be logged in to be able to post comments.
Sign in