The Well Tempered Consort

Description

For this new recording, Phantasm has chosen to arrange for viol consort some of the most remarkable keyboard pages of J. S. Bach. Under the direction of Laurence Dreyfus, the musicians have set out to discover the hidden riches behind the more "neutral" idiom of the harpsichord and organ, bringing to life the fascinating characters lurking in the shadows of the polyphonic lines. In this process of confrontation, the musicians, numbering between 3 and 6, have encountered the astonishing psychological insight of the composer's most radical inventions. Drawn primarily from the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Musical Offering, and the Clavier-Übung III, the repertoire chosen for this recording forges strange connections between Bach and the ancient English traditions of the Fantasia and In nomine, with an incursion into a chromatic world of twelve tones where the raw emotions of expressionist modernism become not only audible but also boldly relevant. A second part of the Well-Tempered Consort ("Le Consort bien tempéré") is already planned for 2021.