By Klaus P Richter
In the middle of the cozy Christmas carol season, András Schiff embarks on the extravagant territory of Bach’s harpsichord concertos in the Isarphilharmonie. The six concertos BWV 1052 to 1056 and 1058 are arrangements of his own music, including the violin concertos in E major and A minor, but they are the nucleus of our piano concert culture.
In doing so, Bach not only follows the musical ethos of his time with the recycling of good ideas, but also an old practice in which the keyboard instruments become the medium of other music, from the first organ intavolaturas to Wagner’s piano reductions. You could tell from the first bar that she was taking Sir András seriously as a brilliant concertante challenge. In doing so, he captures the ambience in which this music from Bach’s Collegium Musicum was performed in the Zimmermann’schen Coffeehaus in Leipzig.
Schiff chooses a virtuoso diction of the fast tempi, with which he transfers the rhetorical brilliance of the harpsichord into the aura of sound of the Steinway – but without pathos or ritardandi. Even without a pedal and in a piano culture that makes the enormous rhythmic drive seem all the more haunting and makes everything figurative shine with crystalline splendour. Only in the slow movements, especially in the Siciliano of the E major Concerto, does he invoke devotion.
But what Schiff’s Bach owes to Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert can be seen in the expressive phrasing of the bass voices, sympathetically supported by his favorite ensemble, the fine Capella Andrea Barca. And finally in the dramatic design of the D minor Concerto. So much applause that there was a solo concert after the concert with the complete partita in G major.