Phantasm: Bach

The Strad Issue: May 2025

Description: A viol consort proves an ideal protagonist for Bach

Musicians: Phantasm, Daniel Hyde (organ)

Works: Bach: The Art of Fugue

Catalogue number: LINN CKD759

Most recordings of Bach’s Art of Fugue are for organ, piano, string quartet or small orchestra. Giving it to a viol consort, however, seems a no-brainer in spite of the fact that viols were old money by 1740. The range of the instruments and the fact that Bach wrote the parts out in open score as if for individual voices make it an inspired choice.

Listening to this disc feels like a meditation, as we are taken from the haunting first solo notes of the subject on which the whole edifice is composed, through increasing complexity of counter-fugues, double fugues and mirror fugues to the mysteriously unfinished final fugue. The canons are played with intricate precision by Daniel Hyde on a suitably flutey-sounding organ in King’s College Chapel. Interspersed between the fugues, they make for a pleasing contrast in texture.

Phantasm offers civilised, measured playing, bringing out the light and the shadows, recorded here in an airy church acoustic with each line rewardingly audible. Having each line played by a different instrument lends more personality and sense of dialogue to the music and the endlessly inventive different characters of the fugues are superbly painted by the four players.

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