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MICHEL BOUVARD & FRANÇOIS ESPINASSE
Such an approach is neither more nor less than that of Bach himself when he
appropriated the music of Vivaldi and his contemporaries or exploited his own
output for new purposes. Hence, for example, the violin not only inspires the
developments of this overture to an election cantata or, by way of individual
fragments from concertos, a number of other concertante movements of the
same nature; it also provides a source of nourishment for solo keyboard works.
The Fugue in Dminor of the Prelude and Fugue for organ BWV539, for instance, is
extrapolated from the second movement of the Sonata no.1 for unaccompanied
violin BWV 1001, also extant in a version for lute. This, the only piece in the
programme exclusively from the hand of Bach, a polyphonic expansion of the
original material, tells us a great deal about the freedom of the transcriber’s
attitude to his model.
Isoir adopts a similar attitude in choosing to replace the brief Prelude conceived
by the composer for this diptych with his own adaptation of the first movement
of the same Sonata BWV 1001, thus reuniting it with the fugue as in the work
for violin. Going beyond mere transposition, he explores in depth how best to
acclimatise the work to its new medium, objectivising what remains implicit in
the strings from the harmonic or contrapuntal point of view, an approach entirely
in keeping with the composer’s treatment of the fugue.