Bach: Musical Offering BWV 1079 - An electronic Realization

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote the “Musical Offering” BWV 1079 late in his life. His son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was employed as a harpsichordist at the court of Frederick the Great (himself a flautist and music connoisseur). Frederick invited the “old Bach” to visit the Potsdam City Palace and demonstrate his legendary improvisational and contrapuntal skills on the palace’s instruments. When Frederick challenged Bach to improvise a six-part piece on the spot, Bach chose to return to his home in Leipzig and come back to Potsdam four months later to present a collection of sixteen pieces, each of which incorporated Frederick the Great’s chromatic theme. The work is regarded as one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s greatest compositional achievements in the field of counterpoint.

Brian Keane explains the album: “When I took on this project at the special request of my friend and longtime business partner Eckart Rahn, I set out to convey the emotional intent, beauty, and genius of Bach’s ‘Musical Offering’ BWV 1079 in a powerful new artistic way, using electronic instruments alone and without compositional embellishment. I studied numerous recordings of the work to gain a sense of Bach’s original intent before translating it into new, multilayered synthetic instruments created for the project. I enlisted classical pianist Emily Wong, currently solo pianist with the American Ballet Theatre in New York, who has performed with the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, among others, for the project. Emily and I went through every detail of the written music. Adjustments were made. Tempo, phrasing, and dynamics were carefully considered, and under my supervision the music was entered into a digital ProTools format using a weighted MIDI keyboard played by Emily. We did not change any keys or notes when entering the music. We adhered exactly to the written score, which we checked against two different printed editions of the score and three or four classical recordings of the piece as originally played on period instruments.”