The Bach Album

The Bach Album

The Baroque practice of adapting music originally written for one instrument to another is well known, and is documented in countless manuscripts and editions of the period. For musicians it was a natural way of expanding their own repertoire. Performers – nearly all of them also well-trained, expert composers – did not limit themselves to merely transcribing the music into another clef or notation. They knew how to exploit the strengths of their instrument – while concealing its weaknesses – so as to preserve the essence of the work and yet rewrite it as if the composer had conceived it for that new medium, with its own technical resources and its harmonic and contrapuntal possibilities.

Particularly interesting is the case of Bach and the musical transfer between melodic and harmonic instruments: on the one hand, his violin and oboe concertos, adapted for keyboard in Leipzig; on the other, some of his solo works for violin and cello, instruments that the genius from Eisenach pushes to such extremes of polyphonic possibility that we know these same works in versions for organ or baroque lute by Bach himself.

In this historical context, the viola da gamba occupies a position of both need and privilege. Unfortunately, its Baroque solo repertoire (senza basso) is relatively scarce and does not reach the sublime heights of Bach’s finest works. Fortunately, its nature as a hybrid instrument allows it to enjoy both the polyphonic possibilities of a lute and the melodic possibilities of bowed instruments. Transcription is therefore as imperative as it is natural: a mere correction – if we may call it that – of the historical accident that deprived Bach of the chance to pour his immense talent into an instrument so particularly suited to his conception of music.

This innate fit between Bach’s music and the nature of the viola da gamba makes the transcriber’s task particularly rewarding – in my case, work that was already necessary and familiar from earlier repertoires. The perfection of Bach’s polyphonic writing, with its immaculate voice-leading, is underlined on the bass viola da gamba by the resonance of the instrument. Sounds that in the originals for flute or violin have to be prolonged in our imagination can reverberate freely and sensually in the body of the viola da gamba, as naturally as in the works written for the instrument by Marais or Forqueray. For the viola da gamba player, this makes all the greater the pleasure of modestly taking up the baton from the great Bach and reaching the depths of the score in the most intimate way: by making his music my own, feeling it as much mine as if it had flowed from my own pen, like material sculpted from the very sonic substance of my instrument.

Faced with music of such perfect purity as Bach’s, the process is always long and laborious, but above all joyful, for there is no better way for it to sound sincere, to communicate its meanings directly from musician to listener, as was the master’s declared wish. The viola da gamba player has the privilege of recreating that intimate connection and, for a few magical moments, feeling Bach’s poetic voice as his own.

Fahmi Alqhai

01. Marizápalos – Gaspar Sanz (1640-1710)
02. Fandango – Santiago de Murcia (1673-1739)
03. Passacalle (Gaspar Sanz)
04. Canarios (Gaspar Sanz)

In this first set of pieces Fahmi Alqhai adapts dances from the Spanish baroque guitar repertoire for the viola da gamba.

05. El canto de los pájaros – Catalan traditional

The classic Catalan cant dels ocells, made famous by Pau Casals.

06. Les pleurs – Mr. de Sainte-Colombe (c. 1640 – c. 1700)
07. Allemande – Mr. de Sainte-Colombe
08. Sarabande. Le pleureux – Mr. de Sainte-Colombe

Marais’s teacher, Sainte-Colombe was the first great French master of the viola da gamba. His pieces are characteristically melancholy.

09. Les sauvages – Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764)

A version of the famous operatic passage from Rameau’s Les indes galantes.

10. Les voix humaines – Marin Marais (1656-1728)
11. La guitare – Marin Marais

Marais was the viola da gamba master par excellence, a leading figure at the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV.

12. Always with me, always with you – Joe Satriani (1956)

From baroque guitar to electric guitar: Fahmi Alqhai covers the great Satriani.

13. Andante from the Sonata BWV 1003 – Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Bach, as an encore.