The six Sonatas and Partitas BWV 1001–1006 were completed by 1720 in Köthen, where Bach served as court Kapellmeister. Three sonatas in four movements, the second of each a large fugue, alternate with three partitas built from dance movements: the first places a Double beside every movement, the second ends with the Ciaccona of more than fourteen minutes, the third opens with the Preludio and leads through Loure, Gavotte en Rondeau, Menuetts and Bourrée to the Gigue. Aldemir plays the cycle complete and in the traditional order, spread over two discs.
The viola is not a substitute instrument for this music but a different perspective on it. It sounds a fifth lower than the violin, its body responds more slowly, and the strings lie further apart. That changes everything Bach asks of the violin: chords have to be broken differently, the fugal voices set apart by other means, and the longer decay keeps audible the inner parts that on the violin often remain merely implied. In the slow movements — the Adagio of the first sonata, the Siciliana, the Largo of the third — the darker tone emerges most clearly.
The instrument was built by Pellegrino de Micheli in Brescia in 1560, making it almost two hundred years older than the music. The recording was made in May/June and September/October 2019 in the St Agnus church in Köthen — the church where Bach received communion during his Köthen years; the communion register of 1720 bearing his handwriting is still kept there. In front of the church stands the Bach monument by Heinrich Pohlmann of 1885.
The booklet prefaces the recording with a foreword remembering Klemens Schmitzer. Born in Halle (Saale) and raised in Dresden, he was a trombonist until illness forced him to give up the profession in 1999; he studied cultural management and worked as an orchestral manager at the Theater Lübeck, the Konzerthaus Berlin and, from 2015, at the Wuppertaler Bühnen. It was in his flat that Atilla Aldemir and Ingo Schmidt-Lucas met for the first time on 20 January 2018, and Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas were among the projects discussed that evening. Half a year later, on 20 July 2018, Aldemir played the Ciaccona at Schmitzer’s funeral in Dresden; he had died suddenly a week after his 51st birthday. The production is dedicated to him.
The two hybrid SACDs run 69:11 and 71:33 and were recorded in stereo, 5.0 surround and 3D binaural stereo, which renders the acoustics of the church spatially over headphones. The booklet runs to 40 pages in German and English.