Francesco Tristano
Schlimé and the New Bach Players
– all young to judge from the concert
photographs and dressed in fashionable
black outfits – have a great deal of
stamina and concentration. They presented
their all-Bach Concertos programme a
few times and this one was recorded
in the Arsenal in Metz,. The band is
international (from the USA to Australia
to Uzbekistan and stops in between),
the soloist-director is from Luxembourg,
the record label is Polish and the booklet
notes are trilingual (English, French,
Polish).
The seven keyboard
concertos concert was a Gouldian one
according to the notes – one that surely
reflects the obsessively Bachian aspect
rather than any particular similarities
between the playing. Schlimé
has referred to his great admiration
for the Canadian pianist and the notes
rather ominously relate that he has
been "compared as a spiritual heir."
Let’s hope not – Schlimé is only
twenty-three and the idea is unhelpful
to him, burdensome and inappropriate.
The New Bach Players
number sixteen - including the flutes
for BWV 1057 – otherwise they’re constituted
8-3-2-1. They play modern instruments
but with awareness of baroque practice
and what is referred to as an infusion
of jazz spirit. I’m not quite sure about
this – it may as well refer to some
of Schlimé’s passagework that
has a rippling momentum and a rhythmic
particularity that sometimes startle.
The D minor Concerto takes a bit of
time to get going and the slow movement
has a filliping rather naughtily phrased
wit, and the finale sports a huge rallentando
in the very difficult cadenza – very
difficult to judge this properly – which
tends to derail momentum; in his commercial
recording Gould was never this dramatic,
and I must say I find it youthfully
unconvincing. The First Concerto is
of a piece with the remainder of the
works – some rather rhetorical phrasing,
somewhat noncommittal and aloof slow
movements (forget Edwin Fischer’s nobility),
very aggressive pizzicati in the Largo
of the F minor – little inwardness here
or singing tone – and in fact not much
of Gould’s grandeur (for all his staccatissimo
phrasing and the obvious differences,
Gould aligned himself more than one
might imagine to Fischer’s sense of
the grand in these work). I felt consistently
throughout that the slow movements were
harried.
The piano is balanced
slightly too forward in the sound spectrum.
One for admirers, this – others will
remain with such as Perahia and Schiff
in their various recordings amongst
modern readings.
Jonathan Woolf
Francesco Tristano Schlimé (piano and conductor)
for
details