Stefan Temmingh, Domen Marincic, Axel Wolf - J.S.Bach - French & English Suites (2011)

Bach and other Baroque composers often transcribed their music for new instrumental combinations as needed under the press of a busy schedule, and performers like South African-born recorder player Stefan Temmingh have taken this fact as carte blanche to create arrangements of Bach's music as desired. You can make various arguments pro or con in connection with this practice, and the procedure here, going from keyboard works to ensemble pieces, is in some ways the most problematical. So what you think of Temmingh's disc may depend on where you come down on the larger question. But there's no question that the Young Turks who have revived the art of recorder playing tend to make entertaining albums, and Temmingh's is no exception. He offers arrangements of two of Bach's French Suites and one English Suite for the combination of recorder and a basso continuo consisting of viola da gamba and lute, together with shorter pieces mostly showcasing his collaborators; the lute pieces exist in several versions by Bach himself, one of them the lute solos actually heard here. Temmingh argues that the melodic quality of the keyboard suites suits them well to the recorder; they are not virtuoso keyboard works, and he doesn't have to stretch when it comes to the range. It might also be argued that the solo-continuo deployment of the arrangement somewhat distorts the relationship between the hands of the keyboard work; contrapuntal voices with similar textures in the original are contrasted in the arrangement. It's hard to argue, however, that Temmingh is anything other than technically superb. He's got a lot of power (an odd thing to say of a recorder player, perhaps, but relevant), and he can carry through a pitch or a short phrase with enough of a sense of a tonal center to let him bend notes a bit without falling into the distressing sliding tones that characterized recorder albums in the bad old days. He's a pleasure to listen to on a disc that will have the most appeal to those with an inclination toward speculative performance styles, and he is aided by total sonic clarity from the crack Oehms engineering team.