J.S.Bach: Art of Fugue – Phantasm

Phantasm and the art of fugue

Phantasm, founded in 1994, is an award-winning consort dedicated to music for viols. They previously, in 1996, released their debut album on Simax Classics (PSC1124) of Henry Purcell´s “Fantasias” and “In Nomines”, which was awarded a Gramophone award for the Best Baroque Instrumental Recording of 1997. A second album – “Still Music of the Spheres: Consorts by Byrd and Mico” (PSC1134) – was named Record of the Month (Jan 1998) in Rondo Magazine. On this album Phantasm takes on Bach´s “Art of Fugue” and Mozart´s “Fugues Arranged for Quartet” and “Fuga in G minor”. However, rather than returning to the past, the imaginative quartet dwell in the here-and-now, evoking a sound-world rich in expression and lyricism.

In the ”Art of Fugue”, an encyclopaedic work devoted to the fading world of learned counterpoint, Bach took a modest theme, and in a progressive series of distinctive fugues and canons, explored how the old devices could be exploited to display every conceivable contrapuntal machination. Although Bach wrote the “Art of Fugue” so that most of it was playable by one person seated at a keyboard, it is not, strictly speaking, a keyboard work. Phantasm´s recording realises twelve Contrapunti from the “Art of Fugue” embracing the three kinds of fugues found in the collection to astonishing results. Only a few decades later, in a very different cultural milieu, Mozart discovered the works of Bach and quickly developed a veritable fashion for both fugal analysis and writing, to which his fascinating string quartet arrangements of fugues from Bach´s “Well-Tempered Clavier” bear witness. Mozart´s striking “Fugue in G minor”, is a somewhat obscure work, ignored in documents surviving from the composer´s lifetime. The fugue nonetheless shows a very strong compositional hand in working through questions of fugal technique and harmonic disposition.