Bach Minimaliste

J. S. Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D minor is the centrepiece of this programme: ‘This music seems absolutely modern to me: a continuous, endlessly developing thread, giving it an almost hypnotic aspect... These adjectives also belong to the vocabulary of today’s music, whether it is “popular”, as in techno, or “art music”, as in the so-called repetitive or minimalist movement’, says Simon-Pierre Bestion. Two hundred and thirty years after Bach, Górecki wrote a harpsichord concerto in the same key, using it ‘as a very rhythmic and extremely stealthy instrument’. John Adams, a leading figure of the American minimalist movement, composed Shaker Loops in 1978: ‘This masterpiece takes on a special interest because we play on instruments with gut strings. That gives the music a very special texture.’ Bach’s Passacaglia (‘a single musical theme heard forty-one times’) and Jehan Alain’s Litanies complete this programme, which brings together the Bestion brothers, with Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas as soloist in the concertos.