Bach Minimaliste Works by JS Bach, Górecki, Nystedt, Alain, John Adams Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas (harpsichord); La Tempête;/Simon-Pierre Bestion Alpha Classics ALPHA985 76:01 mins
Bach and certain minimalist composers have often been successfully juxtaposed, since they can share driving energy and momentum. But if this attempt at presenting Bach as a minimalist looks less likely on paper – despite a lengthy and self-justifying note by the founder-director of the period ensemble La Tempête, Simon-Pierre Bestion – in performance it fails mostly due to playing that lacks that necessary drive. Bestion’s starting point is Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D minor, yet curiously in dispersing the movements across a sort of playlist format he omits the central Adagio altogether. Its steady tread could have fitted the ‘minimaliste’ agenda well, but perhaps we are not missing much; the performance of the outer movements (featuring Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas as soloist) is pretty average, and an arrangement for these forces of the Passacaglia in C minor is similarly uninspiring.
The most successful performance is Henryk Górecki’s two-movement Harpsichord Concerto, a short and spiky work that shares its D minor tonality with the Bach and which ripples along nicely here. The four movements of John Adams’s Shaker Loops are also split up, but at least the work is given complete and hearing it on gut strings is a novelty. Two arrangements – one instrumental, one choral – of Knut Nystedt’s Immortal Bach seem unnecessary; a meditation using Bach’s ‘Komm, süsser Tod’, even in Bestion’s version for voices it sounds less hypnotic and beautiful than Nystedt’s original choral writing. The greatest casualty is Jehan Alain’s celebrated organ piece Litanies, where the harpsichord and strings lack supplicatory intensity.
John Allison