Cuarteto Casals allows Johann Sebastian Bach’s highly complex puzzles to be made as if they appeared on an X-ray without appearing emotionless.
The Quartetto Casals recorded Bach’s “The Art of Fugue” in quartet version. Not an unusual move, but technically more than remarkable as the recording cemented the band’s rank as the best formation. Bach’s puzzle work in all its complexity looks here like an X-ray. If you are explained well enough, you suddenly recognize many things as a matter of course. Same here. For Cuarteto Casals, individual partial writings are not flimsy masses of maneuver, but fragments of a logical structure that are best handled with great care and a cool head. But calm does not mean: emotionless. Thus, at number six, the character “alla francese” is just a like-minded dance in Contrapunctus XII. In the end, the Leipzig Choir’s “I Step Before Your Throne” seems to be the completion of an unfinished cycle.
JS Bach: The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 And I Will Stand Before Your Throne BWV 668
Quartito Caslas
Harmonia Mundi
Quartito Casals
Founded in 1997 at Madrid’s Reina Sofía Music School by Vera Martínez (violin), Abel Thomas (violin), Jonathan Brown (viola) and Arnau Tomás (cello), Quartetto Casals first studied with Walter Levin … continued
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