Johann Sebastian Bach travelled to Potsdam in 1747 to meet with King Frederick the Great. During his visit, he improvised a three-voice fugue on a theme of the King’s devising, later developing the music into the Musical Offering. Given that Bach extemporised upon the newly developed Silbermann fortepiano, the Ricercar a 3 can justifiably be regarded as the first significant work for the piano.
James Lisney’s musical offerings centre upon Beethoven’s three final sonatas, one of music’s great spiritual journeys, written when the composer was turning fifty years old and occupied with the Missa Solemnis. This transcendent, dramatic, lyrical, and ultimately communicative music is prefaced by complementary preludes by Bach, Chopin and Shostakovich.
Myra Hess was a peerless interpreter of Beethoven’s final sonatas and her transcription of Bach’s chorale prelude Jesu bleibet meinen Freude (from the Advent cantata Herz und Mund and Tat und Leben) is the perfect way to mark her passing sixty years ago this month.
“Lisney…made of these sonatas a phoenix, boundlessly expressing a glorious rebirth of Beethoven’s creativity, re-animating the very phrases of his musical processes in all their enchanting, mercurial, forceful, kaleidoscopic variety – brusque and blunt, longing and tender, ineffable and sublime. One felt that all emotions human-beings had ever felt were incomparably here – and, further, some that had been felt only by this extraordinary man and, maybe, just a few others. Lisney gave us a journey of the soul.”The Classical Source
“This is someone who can really give the mechanical box of wires and wood a singing soul.”The Telegraph