Classical IPR’s New Release of the Week features familiar music in a new and surprising interpretation. Marimbist Kuniko performs her own arrangements of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach in Bach: Solo Works for Marimba.
The two-disc album of Bach’s music is over 150 minutes in length. Kuniko’s arrangements include three of the Cello Suites (numbers 1, 3, and 5) and all three of the sonatas for solo violin. Each CD opens with a transcription of a keyboard prelude.
In the liner notes for the album, Kuniko writes that she imagines her performances inspiring people to dance at a social occasion. Each piece on the album includes a similarly evocative statement about how she feels about the music, where she heard it for the first time or what she imagines when hearing it.
Kuniko recorded the album in St. John’s Church, a thirteenth-century church in Tartu, Estonia. She writes in the album’s liner notes that the sound in this medieval church is something that cannot be achieved anywhere else in the world.
