Featured Album June 2025: Phantasm "J S Bach: The Art of Fugue"

One of J S Bach's iconic works is his Art of Fugue, and this month's Featured Album is a new recording by celebrated viol consort Phantasm. Released earlier this year by Linn Records, the consort contains highly sought-after viol players (including Markku Luolagan-Mikkola, creator of the Lu-Mi range of viols we stock in our catalogue) – read on to find out more about this new recording...

J S Bach: The Art of Fugue
Phantasm

OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR JUNE 2025

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From the artist's press release:

The Art of Fugue is Bach’s final composition and one of his most challenging. In this album Phantasm and its director Laurence Dreyfus showcase all the hidden beauties of the composer’s magnum opus, arguably the pinnacle of the fugue genre. Printed in open score, the format allows a rendition on viols, as recorded here. Brimming with rich counterpoint and dynamic conversation among the parts, the work can legitimately claim a place within the consort repertoire. Bach manages to paint a finely delineated set of contrasting musical portraits full of revelations and surprises. Far from an academic encyclopaedia of arcane musical techniques, The Art of Fugue thus embarks on a (unfinished) voyage of discovery shared by an inveterate explorer whose thirst for invention knows no bounds. Organist Daniel Hyde performs four movements in this welcome follow-up to Phantasm’s acclaimed Well-Tempered Consort series.

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Why The Early Music Shop loves "J S Bach: The Art of Fugue":

Composed in the final decade of Johann Sebastian Bach’s life and first published in 1751, a year after his death, The Art of Fugue – 15 fugues and 4 canons, each a variation on a single subject – offers an in-depth exploration of counterpoint on one musical idea, through inversion, augmentation and double and triple fugues. The final three-subject fugue (Fuga a 3 Soggetti) was left incomplete: as Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach wrote, ‘Upon this fugue, where the name BACH [B flat-A-C-B natural] was placed in the countersubject, the author died’, though that is possibly Bach’s son being economical with the truth. Bach may well have not died having reached that point in the score and, besides, he may have deliberately left this final fugue unfinished, setting down a challenge to any musician: why not complete the fugue yourself!

By the 1740s fugal writing was deemed rather old-fashioned, yesterday’s music being eclipsed by the new galant style from figures such as Bach’s sons or composers such as Gluck. Phantasm’s appropriation of The Art of Fugue for a consort of viols is not wholly inappropriate – and in any case, Bach wrote the piece in open score with no indication of which instrument(s) it was intended for. Phantasm has already recorded arrangements of fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier to acclaim, and this new CD of The Art of Fugue is a natural successor. The results are impressive: plaintive lyricism, so characteristic of the viol consort’s sound, is well suited to many of the fugues, as is the consort’s ability to tap into the intensity of emotion in even the densest counterpoint for which Phantasm’s clarity of articulation and attention to phrasing draws out Bach’s lines. Organist Daniel Hyde joins the ensemble for the four Canons.

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J S Bach: The Art of Fugue is available from The Early Music Shop online or in our Snape Maltings showroom.

Click here to order now!

Click below to watch Phantasm perform an extract from the programme, BWV 1080: XI. Contrapunctus 9 alla Duodecima: