Gramophone June 2023

Among the best-selling composers of our time, Ludovico Einaudi has won a following of millions through his distinctively calm, smoothly unfolding works, which spin unbroken songs from the simplest material and cast a spell of relaxed enchantment over their audience.

This is the third and final instalment of the Well-Tempered Consort series (5 Diapasons, Gramophone Editor’s Choice, BBC Music Magazine Chamber Choice). In this programme devised by its director Laurence Dreyfus, the viol consort Phantasm continues to shine new light on the fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier interspersed with some of the composer’s most harmonically adventurous experiments from the Clavierübung III. This polyphonic feast also includes two works from the Inventions and Sinfonias as well as the Fantasia in G major BWV 572, or Pièce d’orgue as it is sometimes called, which boasts an extraordinary closing pedal point. A fitting end to a remarkable journey!

The result really is something special, a performance of growing intensity and concentration, which gradually exerted an iron grip on me as listener – right up until a deeply moving ‘Der Leiermann’.