"J. S. Bach Revisited Afresh"

An astonishing traversal of Bach’s seven concertos for keyboard and strings, played in concert and recorded live as part of the Arsenal’s cross-borders program

METZ-ARSENAL. - The multiplicity of interpretive styles flourishing over the past twenty or thirty years has plunged listeners into a veritable musicological forest. The “new-look” restoration of seven works offered by the recently formed New Bach Players (founded in June 2002) establishes yet another new tree in the woods. It was planted there by the flawless, dazzling, Olympian, idealistic, Spartan pianist Francesco Schlimé, who reveres Glenn Gould (who died just twenty years ago) and paid him homage by playing the complete cycle of Bach’s keyboard concertos on the concert Steinway of the Salle de l’Esplanade, with fourteen international string players standing in a semi-circle around him.

It was a Gouldian evening, and Baroque purists would have found plenty of reasons to be up in arms. Schlimé’s version, while not sweeping all others from the field, established itself as one to be reckoned with. He played from memory, without pedal, and led his strings toward an interpretation that could be called “mixed,” though it fundamentally belongs to modernity: the piano was modern, the tuning was modern, the string playing was modern. Even if one factors in the occasional use of period bows, some ornaments in 18th-century style, certain stresses, swelling bass notes, quick and dry punctuating chords, and the pedal-free piano, we are still closer to the future than to the past.

There can be no doubt that Francesco Schlimé has steeped himself in Gould, to whom he has been compared as a spiritual heir. But it would not be correct to speak of identification, much less of mimicry, for his finger technique is different, his relationship to the keyboard more distant, his sense of rhythm more syncopated, as though approaching Bach through jazz, and his legato more on the surface, even shallowly so.

He is, to be sure, endowed with a kind of infallible technique and musicianship as he unwinds, with utter imperturbability, his ribbon of sound, often barely grazing the keys, unable to imagine even the possibility of the slightest mishap, a gap unthinkable between himself and the orchestra he cues, hands raised, from his bench. He aerates his piano as he aerates his strings. It is a breezy kind of playing, Cartesian, of bracing freshness and clocklike precision. Imagine a Bach living in his peaceful country retreat, dreaming of a truly happy music shorn of emotional effusions, whirling with virtuosity through allegros taken presto, not getting too worked up in his larghettos, opening, for the cadenzas, little windows that admit a light rubato. It is a perfected sonic world. Have we perhaps entered a new sensibility, one we might call post-modern? This is the first time that anyone has presented all seven concertos at Metz. Even Gould only recorded six.

Goerges Masson in Le Républicain Lorrain, Octobre 11th 2002

Translation: Marc Getlein