40 / 64
The cantata sinfonia that opens this disc immediately reveals the
nature of its programme. From Bach to Isoir, the parody technique
that reuses the same musical material in different instrumental or
vocal contexts is illustrated in particularly radical fashion here. For
this piece takes its substance from the Preludio of the Partita no.3 for
unaccompanied violin BWV 1006, of which Bach subsequently made
an expanded concertante version for organ and orchestra intended to
introduce cantatas: the work written for the inauguration of the new
Leipzig town council in 1731 (
Wir danken dir, Gott
BWV 29,
scored for three
trumpets, kettledrums, two oboes, strings and obbligato organ) and,
before that, the cantata
Herr Gott, Beherrscher aller Dinge
BWV 120a, in
which the avatar of the violin prelude opens the second part. André Isoir
has therefore continued the process by transposing these pages in his
turn for solo organ, in a twofold stance of fidelity and adaptation that
reproduces the essence of the initial musical ideas.
Most of the works recorded here, some of them among Bach’s most
famous, have undergone successive transformations, evolutions and
enrichments of this kind; sometimes the composer himself had already
subjected them to a variety of metamorphoses before André Isoir took
them up and turned them into pure organ works. As in Bach, this form
of assimilation draws without distinction on sources instrumental or
vocal, sacred or secular, from the chorale to the sonata and the cantata
to the concerto, and results in genuine recreations.