Review of Bach Guitar Duo di Florindo Baldissera e Vittorino Nalato, 2008

Centuries later after his death and his rediscovery thanks to Mendelssohn, Bach’s almost physical presence and importance in the Western music seems to have not yet exhausted his influence and, more importantly, the possibilities of implementing and exploration of that wonderful musical and cultural baggage that the Great Master has left us a legacy. His compositions are inside the vast music library a further library, a universe organized and defined in an open form that generously lets his performers always new expression and artistic freedoms continually renewed and without having to acknowledge any formal tribute to the god Kronos, whose nefarious work he seems immune. The essayist (and composer) Luciano Berio writes in his wonderful book "A recall to the Future" about the importance of the transcriptions: “The transcription has often been an instrument for commenting and assimilate information and experiences of the past and from other places. This is why it is sometimes difficult to give precise boundaries of the vast territory of the transcription. " This CD is a perfect musical translation of these words, Melita Fontana writes in the booklet accompanying this CD: "Keys have often been transposed and some melodic lines are an octave above or below the original... The musical structure of the pieces (themes, forms and harmonies) has been left unchanged, the only adaptation relating to the idiomatic requirements of the instruments." Florindo Baldisssera and Vittorino Nalato with their guitars recast the music of Bach giving him new blood and gettino back new ideas and forces, this because (again Berio) "If a musical thought will manifest itself fully in relation to a text, must be able to modify the text and, even though it is conditionated by itself, to conduct on it an analytical transformation” .

In this sense, this is the beauty that shines through the notes of this CD: the ability to stay within the tradition and at the same time the courage to make the formal changes that do not alter the content, who expects to hear guitarists who performing Bach with the thought of Segovia would be disappointed, who will accept these new transcriptions will listen to Bach with new ears and draw new ideas and new thoughts, and in a sense, this is the challenge that awaits all classical music.
I finish still quoting Berio: "... everything can be music with the condition that the total being shall be musically conceptualized, analyzed and translated on different levels. Such view and translation is possible only with the notion of music as text: a text multidimensional evolving. " Baldissera and Nalato have stood the test of Bach’s hypertext.