Bacchetti Bach

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica calls him almost the “most talented Bach pianist” in Italy, and Andrea Bacchetti has given concerts internationally on the world’s largest classical music stages. When Bacchetti talks about Bach, he calls his music “his life, his day and his night”. Hardly any other pianist manages to read Bach’s music in such a modern and precise way as the interpreter from Genoa does. On his latest release, he has now devoted himself to the second part of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Piano Book, one of the key works of the Baroque era, on whose music Bacchetti has specialized for years.

Baldassare Galuppi was a Venetian composer, mainly noted for his large output in opera and his collaborations with Goldoni who wrote many a libretto for him, some of which that were re-used by subsequent composers (like Il Mondo della Luna and Haydn). His dates - 1706 -1785 - make him part of a later generation than Bach, Vivaldi, Haendel and Scarlatti but of an older one than Haydn and Mozart, and roughly a contemporary of Bach's two eldest sons - Wilhelm-Friedemann and Carl-Philipp-Emmanuel. The Sonatas featured here are performed in a new edition from the original sources (usually contemporary copies rather than original manuscripts) by Mario Marcarini (who wrote the liner notes) and pianist Andrea Bacchetti.

Andrea Bacchetti follows his album of sonatas by Baldassarre Galuppi with another little-performed 18th century Venetian, Benedetto Marcello, whose work has a surprisingly modern character. The "Sonata III", for instance, opens with a sequence in which the right hand plays the same note 48 times in rapid succession, while the left cycles quadruplets around it – the kind of gambit you'd expect from a Cage or Feldman, but hardly from a contemporary of Vivaldi. Marcello is said to have once fallen into a grave that opened beneath him, a trauma perhaps responsible for the austere, near-spiritual logic of pieces such as the "Sonata V", where the absence of frills prefigures the enigmatic miniatures of Erik Satie.