*** 180g Vinyl LP ***

A high-grade LP transfer for a superbly engineered album of Bach at his most life-enhancing.

JS Bach may not have composed any concertos specifically for recorder – none have survived, at any rate – but he scored for the instrument elsewhere in his output, most unforgettably so in his earliest surviving cantata, the ‘Actus tragicus’. In any case the uniquely adaptable nature of his inspiration lends itself to the kind of sympathetic adaptation undertaken here by Erik Bosgraaf in partnership with the musicologist and art historian Thiemo Wind.

Three of the concertos here have been adapted from pieces which survive in a scoring for solo harpsichord and string orchestra: BWV 1053, 1055 and 1059. A fourth concerto has been constructed by Wind from transcriptions of cantata arias, adapted from the secular cantata Preise dein Glücke, gesegnetes Sachsen, BWV215, and Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen, BWV32. The idea is humble but ingenious, answering the question: what might Bach have done, or could he have done, if he had written concertos for the recorder?

In doing so, Bosgraaf and his colleagues are following good precedents: after all, Bach himself created and performed many such transcriptions. His oeuvre demonstrates that a composition was not regarded as an unchanging work of art, and during his lifetime it was standard procedure to make quite radical adaptations according to the relevant circumstances.