Thomas Dunford - Bach (2018) [CD Rip]

Thomas Dunford was once called the teenage rock star of the lute; he's 30 here, but he's still making albums that cross the usual boundaries of lute music. There's nothing so outwardly unusual about this one. Bach himself transcribed his own and others' music in various ways, and set the precedent for arranging other music for the lute with the version of the Suite No. 5 in C minor for solo cello, BWV 1011, heard here. The lute version moves to the key of G minor, and the work has its own catalog number, BWV 995. Listened to closely, it's a little tour of the ways Bach thought about the relationships among harmony, counterpoint, texture, and register, and what makes the album so compelling is that Dunford has applied his insights to his own transcriptions of Bach for archlute. Sample the grand finale, the mighty Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 for solo violin, BWV 1004, a piece that you might think unalterably native to the violin. Not in Dunford's hands, it isn't. Through skillful control over the lute's ability to produce sustained tones, he replicates the effects of how Bach stresses the violin with ongoing double and triple stops, and the work really has much of the power it attains in a superior violin performance. The opening Suite No. 1 for solo cello, BWV 1007, is equally strong, and Dunford benefits from impressive engineering work on Avie's part in the Théâtre Populaire Romand in Switzerland. An impressive lute release that will appear to more than specialists. ~ James Manheim