Dorothee Oberlinger, Christian Rieger - J.S. Bach: A due per Flauto e Cambalo (2007)

In its way, this German release is more radical than many of the other discs on which recorder players have asserted their rights to big swaths of the Baroque repertory. The radical quality doesn't lie in the arrangement of Bach works for the recorder, which in no way goes beyond Bach's own musical recycling ethic. (Three works were originally written for flute, one was an organ trio sonata, one was a violin sonata, and one is for harpsichord alone.) The unusual quality of the arrangement instead lies in the treatment of the accompanimental harpsichord, which is all alone with no gamba or anything else supporting its fundamental line. The advantage of this, according to recorder player Dorothee Oberlinger and harpsichordist Christian Rieger, is that "the possibility of entering into a musical dialogue as well as a close examination of the music and collaboration between the two players is greatly enhanced." Picking through the Teutonic sentence structure and listening to the disc, you'll find that what you've acquired is a group of Bach pieces treated as though they were duo sonatas -- something not far removed from his aesthetic but just slightly foreign to it. Baroque music is an intrinsically flexible thing, and Bach in particular stands up to synthesizers or pretty much whatever else you throw at it. When revisionism is done well and sensitively, as it is here, the result is Bach viewed through a prism, one that puts some colors in that weren't there in the first place, but also makes you view the item in new ways. Oberlinger and Rieger are an arresting pair; Rieger delivers rich sonorities on a copy of a 1728 German harpsichord (listen to the density he brings to later sections of the fugue in the solo Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro, BWV 998, track 27) and takes time toward the ends of long phrases -- pushing Oberlinger toward the recorder's expressive limits. Whether she plays the recorder expressively or pushes the pitch a bit too far at times will depend entirely on individual tastes, but even those inclining toward the latter view will be swept along by the momentum of the music. The cover of this album offers a little demonstration of the influence of online retailing; the buyer picking up the disc in a brick-and-mortar environment would hardly have an idea of what it contained. But the engineering team at Deutschlandfunk's Cologne studio has done superbly, providing close-up intensity without a hint of booming or harshness.