BACH 29-01-18
This is the first production presented by Backlash. The recording features violinist Artiom Shishkov performing solo works by J. S. Bach. The project evolved through several recording sessions, interviews, concerts, and public talks.
Using only one take for each piece, the result presents compositions recorded in their entirety, not patched together from a myriad of takes. The two recordings featured are from the last day of recording, and include the memory of three preceding days of continuous playing.
Artiom Shishkov (violin)
Johann Günther (producer)
Katya Abramkina (photos)
MORNING
J. S. Bach: Sonata no. 2 in a - minor
EVENING
J. S. Bach: Partita no. 2 in d - minor
The goal of this particular recording has been to work with long, complete takes of the pieces in their entirety. This simple starting point had many consequences, such as extensive listening to pre-recordings, working with the producer on the performance itself rather than the recording, and multiple trial recordings of the whole program. This approach was only possible given Artiom's particular history of working this way.
During the summer of 2011, Artiom spent months on the streets of Paris, performing the Bach Chaconne up to 7 hours a day. During the first week he discovered a rather rapid degeneration of the quality of his playing. Puzzled, he began wondering if this development was inescapable. Given no time to practice between the performances, he began to analyze himself while playing to find out why he would fail at something, and how he could improve next time around. This forced a working process with the isolation of difficult places, where all musical content is always repeated practice within the context of the piece at large. He ended up performing the Chaconne several hundred times, with public performance being his only mode of working on the music.
Given Artiom´s background, it quickly became clear that the subject of the recording would be Bach’s Violin Partita and Sonata no. 2.
At the start Johann and Artiom decided upon a greatly expanded recording period, with the first session taking place at the Kulturquartier in Berlin-Buch in the winter of 2017. Following a discussion on the art of recording in Berlin in October 2017, Artiom presented his continuous process with the music once more. In this period we introduced a concert format where Artiom played the pieces on stage while being recorded, and then afterwards would listen to the result together with the audience. This was presented at PODIUM Esslingen and at Radialsystem in Berlin.
“I think it is an important part as a musician to improvise, no matter how many thousand times you’ve played the piece. I would say that I prefer to practice on possibilities and then I choose possibilities on stage. (...) And then I just enjoy the music [...] But on stage I try to play it like for the first time, as if I didn’t know the music. To consciously listen and try to forget that I try to know this by heart, but just to think how this would be for me if I listened to it for the first time.”
During the year preceding the recording, Johann and Artiom met nine times to work, record and listen. In January 2018 they finally got on a plane to the little town of Haugesund on the west coast of Norway, borrowed a car from a local musician, and drove to the even smaller town of Valevåg. There, well installed in a small wooden church, they spent four days completing twelve full takes of the entire program.
Back in Berlin, they listened to the different recordings to see which they would present in the end. Quickly two versions were chosen as favorites: one presented a performer in control, bringing to life a calm, balanced and logical Bach; the other was much colored by tiredness and zeal, but also full of risks, inspiration, spontaneous ideas and accidental resolutions that showed a different kind of beauty. These were not necessarily in opposition to each other, but it left everyone with the questions:
What shall the final recording sound like and feel like? Which qualities are most important for the experience of a recording to an audience? Is there a natural logic a musician follows when performing a piece of music? And what does one have to give up in pursuit of it?
The title of the recording represents the final recording day, on which they captured the final version of both pieces, one in the morning and one in the evening.
Pictures and videos by Katya Abramkina (except paris video).