the differences between Johann Sebastian Bach and John Cage are obvious. They are so obvious that you could be tempted to think that Tristano consciously decided on a high-contrast album programme. Which is certainly true to an extent. Only in the case of bachCage, the artist wasn’t out for provocation just for the sake of it. In fact, this album begins to unfold only at the second and third glance. In the foreground is Tristano’s idiosyncratic and very personal handling of his musical pioneers, Bach and Cage. In all of his precise interpretation of Bach, the music is very much alive and sounds conspicuously wiry and percussive. Probably in part due to the recording’s metallic, occasionally tough sound. Production partner Moritz von Oswald’s involvement becomes even more apparent in Tristano’s Cage recordings. Preparation of the instrument has given way to post-processing aided by studio technology subtly added by Von Oswald and Tristano. And so, the sound of Tristano’s dreamy interpretation of John Cage’s In a Landscape brings to mind distant Gamelan music echoes. The interludes by Tristano himself have a fey and disembodied effect due to the targeted use of reverb effects, and – thanks to filter technology – the final Bach Menuet II from French Suite no. 1 features the sound of a musical clock. Another, deeper aspect comes to bear on this album, because his subjective choice of pieces sees Francesco Tristano organically blend Bach and Cage, blurring borders while emphasising shared elements. One of these being that both masters are connected by a mathematically oriented approach to composition. Tristano’s selection of pieces and their sequence, some of which has been tested in a live context, are based on tonal convergence, on cyclical structures and their polyphonic construction as duets. Tristano has also found spiritual common ground in both composers, which he conveys through his own compositions. Perhaps Tristano is one of the first representatives of a new generation of musicians who no longer belong to a specific school. This generation also takes advantage of the fact that practically the whole repertoire of all music ever recorded is available on the Internet. The most diverse kinds of music stand alongside each other, taken out of their typical context and available in some would say, a more democratic form. Tristano makes use of this, stamping his mark on the world of music and providing a fresh and unique sound, unlike anything that has been heard before.

Francesco Tristano plays Buxtehude, Bach and Tristano “Long Walk” – the twenty-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach undertook one such walk in 1705, when he hiked the 250 miles from Arnstadt to Lübeck to hear Dietrich Buxtehude, who was famous for his organ playing. The visit had been planned to last only a few weeks but turned into a three-month period of study, during which Buxtehude became Bach’s teacher. Dietrich Buxtehude (1637–1707) is arguably the most famous early Baroque German composer. As Kantor at the Marienkirche in Lübeck he occupied one of the leading positions in Germany’s musical life. His musical language is notable for its wealth of imagination and harmonic boldness. Central to Francesco Tristano’s new album is Buxtehude’s most important keyboard composition, the aria La capricciosa, thirty-two variations on the folksong Kraut und Rüben. Bach’s three months with Buxtehude left a lasting mark on his musical output, a point that emerges with particular clarity from one of his most famous late works, the Goldberg Variations. Like La capricciosa, this set of variations is in G major. Both pieces, moreover, are formally identical and reveal many musical parallels. In his final variation, the Quodlibet, Bach even quotes the Kraut und Rüben theme as a homage to his teacher. In 1974 Bach’s personal copy of the printed score of the Goldberg Variations came to light and was found to contain a kind of appendix in the form of fourteen canons on the first eight bass notes of the Aria. This appendix is now officially numbered as BWV 1087. In Long Walk, Francesco Tristano has combined and, as it were, “remixed” these sophisticated miniatures, in that way exploring the more playful dimension of Bach’s learned counterpoint. Tristano picks up another Baroque tradition with the second of his pieces in this album: Ground Bass is essentially a chaconne, a set of variations on an ostinato bass similar to the one that Buxtehude created three centuries earlier in his Ciaccona BuxWV 160. In Long Walk Francesco Tristano relocates Baroque music in the here and now, which he does not only through his interpretation and adaptation of the music of Buxtehude and Bach but also in terms of the recording’s use of technology, which opens up new dimensions with regard to sonority: twelve microphones of differing tonal characteristics were used in the Kyoto Concert Hall in Japan, which was chosen because of its exceptional resonance. They capture the undistorted sound of the Yamaha CFX concert grand on which Francesco Tristano performs these works, a high-tech piano that is the result of many years of research into materials, tone colours and construction techniques.