It’s a testament to the enduring power and beauty of Bach’s music–and the eloquent, elegant, mathematical precision of The Art of Fugue in particular–that no matter how badly one manipulates Bach’s writing, the music never loses its potency. This disc of pointless arrangements by Heribert Breuer, who says he has spent 25 years working on this project, gives ample evidence. Given the time he’s spent on this exercise, I do hope that Breuer at least has found some sense of purpose in all this, because frankly, I can’t. Breuer grandly claims that he wanted to create “the most transparent tonal spectrum possible, whose colors should form a counterweight to the work’s ever-present polyphony.”
Bach’s manuscript gives no information as to intended instrumentation, and Breuer takes this as an invitation to experiment in a setting for four quite varied quartets. (Keyboard is a widely accepted option, and the Juilliard Quartet also recorded a gorgeous string quartet version for Sony some years ago.) Of course, Bach has been arranged imaginatively and enjoyably by everyone from Mahler to jazzman Jacques Loussier, but success depends on a coherent point of view, an ingredient Breuer lacks. What we wind up with is a Bach salad: a little of this, a little of that, but it’s apples and anchovies in the same bowl.
Breuer careens schizophrenically between arrangement styles: the first contrapunctus is arranged for string quartet; the second for two pianos, vibraphone, and bass in a stilted jazz arrangement; the third is for wind quartet; the fourth, in some misbegotten wink at early music, for two recorders and two viola da gambas; and the first canon is played on organ (later in the disc, harpsichord appears as well). Even more weirdly, Breuer proceeds to combine these quartet ensembles, and styles, for the remainder of the disc, until we come to the dizzying Contrapunctus 14, where all four ensembles perform together in one huge mishmash. In a Bach anniversary year (2000), you have to expect all kinds of releases, but this is one of the most egregiously misguided efforts.
