"The Return of the Prodigy"

Francesco Tristano Schlimé and the New Bach Players pay homage to Glenn Gould

Despite his precocious age, Francesco Tristano Schlimé is no longer at the beginning of his career. Wasn’t it here in these very pages that we evoked the deep impression the young Turk made in Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto, where he displayed “a conquering talent that needs only to mature” ( Letzebuerger Land , 30 March 2001)? Some 18 months later, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the death of Glenn Gould, the prodigy returned—on October 5th, at the Conservatory in the capital—to play the complete keyboard concertos of J. S. Bach (BWV 1052–1058) with the New Bach Players, an ensemble he recently founded in New York and which, primus inter pares , he conducts from the keyboard, according to Baroque practice. The New Bach Players is a truly cosmopolitan ensemble, with no less than eleven nationalities represented among its 17 instrumentalists.

The slightest false step—a touch too rigid here, a bit too much starch there—and these fantastically lively scores can amount to nothing. They become, in Colette’s phrase, “sewing machines of genius,” nattering infernally on and on. Happily, with quicksilver liveliness and energy to spare, our young leading man and his friends offered a reading that was anything but dull. All was lightness itself—playful, whirling, joyously buoyant. Despite the underplayed dynamic contrasts, things were swinging to the max in the land of Jazz-Sebastian Bach! The performances glowed with the sheer pleasure of making music, of playing with and for each other. Rhythms bounced, phrases surged, yet the players never confused speed with rushing. With sovereign control, masterful poise, and a classical command unmarred by self-serving virtuosity, the NBP did not hesitate to tilt at received ideas, such as the awful habit of always pushing at the tempo. In the slow movements, their spacious playing rather let a tempo make itself felt.

Thanks to them, Papa Bach suffered an attack . . . of youthfulness, losing that stuffy expression and blasted wig we all too willingly picture him with. Perked up by this rejuvenating cure, he emerged freed from the dross of the centuries, once again his old self, sensual and alive, a bit unbridled, but with bracing energy.

To be completely honest, with Bach played on the modern piano, one can always fear the worst (everyone can’t be Glenn Gould!). Yet here was “Chicho,” surrounded by a handful of enthusiastic young men and women, the oldest not yet 27, the youngest barely 18, all musicians to the tips of their fingers, offering definitive proof that the quarrel over period versus modern instruments, if ever it was timely (and heaven knows if it ever was), loses all urgency if the spirit is right. It was. And every second was a pleasure, even if some might feel that seven concertos in one evening makes for a stodgy program that must perforce end up as too much of a good thing. Readers who jump to this conclusion

forget that at least three (and perhaps up to five) of the keyboard concertos are transcriptions: of the fourth Brandenburg concerto, of concertos for violin or oboe d’amore.

Combining the aristocracy of a superior technique with an expressivity that shuns facile effects, the young prodigy from Luxembourg made a convincing case for an exquisitely songful Bach, astonishing in his vitality and humility.

José Voss in Lëtzebuerger Land, October 10th 2002

Translation: Marc Getlein