Ilya Gringolts - Ciaccona: Bach, Hergard, Holliger, Pauset

Throughout his career, Ilya Gringolts has devoted himself to performing contemporary music as well as the great concert repertoire, while also developing a keen interest in historical performance practice. The focus of his latest recital disc is therefore quite logical: music of our own time and its inspiration: Johann Sebastian Bach. The album title is Ciaccona and besides Bach�s iconic composition, Gringolts plays a further two chaconnes � or three if one counts the Ciacconina which opens Heinz Holliger�s brief cycle, composed for Isabelle Faust in 2014. The Spanish composer Roberto Gerhard wrote his Chaconne using his own take on twelve-tone technique. In his introduction to the album, Gringolts describes its twelve movements as including �everything from chorale to l�ndler � probably the most Viennese music ever written by a Catalan.� The disc closes with Kontrapartita by the French composer Brice Pauset, �a kind of through-the-looking- glass Bach partita� to quote Gringolts once again. Pauset composed his work in 2008 � seven movements, each written with a particular movement from Bach�s partitas for solo violin in mind. For this work (and the interwoven movements by Bach) Gringolts has chosen to use a violin with a baroque setup, finding that the instrument seemed to respond to the �historically informed avant-garde� of the writing.