Ann-Helena Schluter Bach: Fantasias & Duets

My own music is influenced by the music of Bach. Having studied in the Bach city of Leipzig, fallen in love with his fugues as a child and won with his Preludes in the Jugend musiziert competition, achieved my first Bach cycle with the Goldberg Variations (in the USA for my Master in music and my first album recording) then I was moved more and more deeply by the Credo, the inner conviction, in Bachs music. My imaginative powers, my musical energy (timbres, sounds, creativity, poetry) must be imbued with this richness. New music looks quite different from what it was in Bachs day (some even say it is all philosophy now, no melodies, notes or harmonies required). If modern music is still to be music, even today, and if it is still to enrich peoples lives, a thing of value that they can and will remember, then Bachs store of wealth can always come to the aid of us composers. And so it is that J.S. Bach, who never left Germany and spent so long in Leipzig for want of a better position, today more than ever embraces the whole world with a web of his music, in all the places he never travelled to, whether Spain, Franconia, Hesse, Sweden, or far beyond Europe. (Ann-Helena Schlüter)