3 out of 5

Label: Auris Apothecary

Produced by: Dante Augustus Scarlatti (?)

My ears don’t know classical; this release isn’t “for” me. I couldn’t tell you a Bach versus anything else except by guessing, and I don’t know what a Partitas is without looking it up. The description for this release is “three minor key partitas … re-imagined for synthesizers,” and between that and my admitted ignorance of all things in this genre, perhaps you can figure out where you stand on this. For me, I can only assess it from afar – how it works to me on its own standing. Generally, when someone is covering something, I’ll try to dig up the original and compare, but classical is a whole different bag, as we have generations of takes on the same pieces, and even being able to speak to the nuances between them feels like a bit of a skill. As with all music, I’m sure it’s just a matter of some particular piece kind of “unlocking” an appreciation for the genre for me, and that’d help me to begin exploring / understanding, but that hasn’t happened yet, despite some efforts.

So anyhow, take what I’m about to say with even more grains of salt than usual.

Scarlatti is playing Partitas 2, 3, and 6 in various minor keys from the “werke für klavier” BWVs (i.e. keyboard compositions as classified as part of the “Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis / “Bach works catalogue” groupings, and yes, I’m wikipediaing this info solely for my own education, ’cause you smart peoples know it already); as per the above description, they are played on synths, maybe notably analog synths. This, to me – reminding I am ignorant – gives the renditions a video gamey feel, like something you’d heard in Castlevania, or some other retro joint that 8-bit lifts from more “stately” compositions. Of course, these are not gamey in the sense that they’re particularly upbeat, though they’re also by no means slow or boring, and the various sections of each partita breaks up the experience even further.

…Which is a plus and minus, as not everything feels very linked to my ears, meaning you experience a lot of starts and stops within each partita, without what I might be traditionally expecting from a set of instrumental tracks on an album. So while I’d say the experience has a lot of change, which can be positive for those of us with, perhaps, a negative bias towards classical, and viewing it as less involving, it also doesn’t allow for getting really immersed in any given piece, which is also doubled down on by how relatively “flat” the recording is. I mean, Auris is an experimental label, and so recasting these compositions through a very particular sound is in line with that, but even going the headphones route, the presentation doesn’t envelop; it’s easy to shunt it to the background.

How much Scarlatti adds to or alters these works I, of course, cannot say. I really like the physical presentation, as usual, with the tweaked cover image of the composer and the yellow cassette, all of it balancing the relatively straightforward nature of the music versus the destructive tone of the label, and it’d be interesting if this was a series similar to the video game soundtracks Auris released (and maybe that’s also why I linked this sound to VGM…). But overall, I can’t quite make it more than an “interesting” listen, and not something to which I’d be likely to return too often, underlining yet again how your appreciation for the genre likely drastically affects how this works for you.