Die Kunst der Fuge

The composer Oriol Cruixent talks about his arrangement of The Art of the Fugue (BWV 1080):

>>As a composer, confronting myself with this milestone in the history of composition was an opportunity to deal with the 23 fugues, canons and counterpoints of Bach's The Art of the Fugue. The task of compressing such a 90-minute work into a 30-minute version without losing the essence of the original turned out to be particularly challenging. The result of this was a unique selection of eight "movements", whereby the whole range of counterpoint and compositional styles from the original version is preserved. In order to intensify the coherence of this selection, I created a dramaturgical bow inspired in the structures of the vocal compositions of the Renaissance (which Bach also often made use of), where the full polyphonic four-part instrumentation is used in the first five chosen counterpoints; A later reduction of parts takes place in the sixth and seventh movements (reduced to three and two-parts respectively), to eventually end with the crowning, full four-part unfinished Fugue.

Another challenge turned to be the instrumentation, since Bach did not provide any specific details about it. This fact inspired me to create a new version including two modern instruments (Vibraphone and Marimba) and two historical instruments (Violin and Violoncello). Thus an acoustic connection between our contemporary time and the time when the work was created could be sucessfully established.<<

This work was commissioned by the Bavarian State Opera and premiered on 26th July 2016 at the Cuvilliés Theater in Munich by Claudio Estay, Carlos Vera Larrucea, David Schultheiß and Jakob Spahn.