Fiona Maddocks 

All You Need is Bach CD review – Cameron Carpenter goes digital

Cameron Carpenter (organ)(Sony)
  
  

Cameron Carpenter: ‘organ aficionados may wince’.
Cameron Carpenter: ‘organ aficionados may wince’. Photograph: Michael Hart

This CD promises to display “the unique capabilities of Cameron Carpenter’s international touring organ”. The popular, spiky-haired American virtuoso has addressed the challenge of being a soloist unable to travel with his instrument. This digital organ, designed to his specifications, can fit into a truck and be assembled in a couple of hours. An idiosyncratic player, Cameron includes here his own arrangements of Contrapunctus IX from The Art of Fugue, a French Suite and Invention No 8 in F major (as well as some tracks Bach prepared earlier). Organ aficionados may wince, but to non-specialist ears the instrument sounds lively and flexible, from delicate to all-out beefy, much like its communicative player.

Cameron Carpenter performs Bach’s French Suite No 5 in G Major, BWV 816 – Gigue.
 

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