Bach: The 7 Toccatas - Francesco Tristano - Audio CD (Arrives in 50 days)

With their vividly contrasting, almost fluorescent colours, the photographs by Breno Rotatori which adorn Francesco Tristano's third album devoted to his beloved Johann Sebastian Bach, fittingly reflect the assertively alluring joys which leap from the pianist's fingers in the Toccatas, BWV 910-916. These seven scores, whose origins and precise datings remain doubtful (no autograph manuscript has survived), probably go back to 1707. A young man, then aged a little over 20 but by then thoroughly immersed in the music of northern Germanic lands, Bach then landed his first real job at Mühlhausen, as organist. Two years previously, his hankering for keyboard instruments ever growing, his meeting with Buxtehude unlocked the secrets of the northern Germanic manner (more or less the st ylus fantasticus), and spurred the young composer on to write more ambitious, virtuosic pieces in which the strictness of Italian and German masters like Frescobaldi, Reincken or Froberger would be combined with a contrapuntal ingenuity far beyond the norm to form the keystone of his creativity.

Label: Naive | Origin: Holland