Guitarist Alisson Alípio Plays BWV 1005

Guitarist Alisson Alípio playing Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1005 solo violin sonata in C major (screenshot from the Omni on-Location YouTube video)

Late this morning the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts released the latest video in its OMNI on-Location series. This was a solo guitar recital performed by Alisson Alípio in Brazil in the city of Curitiba. His selection was the last of the three solo violin sonatas by Johann Sebastian Bach composed in the key of C major, his BWV 1005.

Those familiar with Bach’s six solo violin compositions, three sonatas and three partitas, know that there is a more than generous share of polyphony in his demands on the performer. Since the guitar tends to be, by nature, a polyphonic instrument, one might say that it is almost more “at home” with that polyphony than the violin would be. Indeed, in the hands of a skilled guitarist serving as both arranger and performer, the different strings of the instrument can summon up a diversity in sonorities. So it is often the case that the different “polyphonic voices” are more readily revealed through that diversity.

Alípo prepared his own arrangement of BWV 1005. That arrangement was clearly sensitive to allowing the guitarist to “sort out” those different “voices.” Thus, even those familiar with solo violin performances of BWV 1005 might discover aspects of Bach’s polyphonic rhetoric better revealed through the guitar than through the violin! Mind you, I am still perfectly happy listening to this sonata the way Bach wrote it; but I also enjoyed the experience of “listening in a new light” through Alípo’s guitar arrangement.