In her first recording for the ES-DUR label, baroque violinist Anais Chen together with her musical partner Alexandra Ivanova approach JS Bach’s sonatas for harpsichord and violin in a highly individual manner, with style and passion.

In 1859, the Austrian opera singer and music collector, Franz Xaver Hauser, made a remarkable find in an attic: he discovered a manuscript “Six Sonatas for Violin and Obbligato Harpsichord” by Johann Sebastian Bach, which is the oldest surviving copy of these works to date. It was largely created in 1725 by Bach’s nephew Johann Heinrich Bach who was 18 years old at the time. These sonatas, which count amongst Bach’s most performed and recorded chamber music works, were already widely distributed in the 18th century amongst his contemporaries. In this cycle, Bach frees the harpsichord from its role as a figured bass instrument and juxtaposes the right hand of the keyboard instrument with the violin, while the left hand establishes the bass.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach counted these amongst the “best works of his dear father” and wrote in a letter to Johann Sebastian’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel 1774: “There are certain Adagios in them whose cantabile qualities are unsurpassed to this day.”