ESMERALDA'S WALTZ 

IVAN PETRICEVIC

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Bach and Bogdanovic share the stage

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The point of intersection between Johann Sebastian Bach and Dusan Bogdanovic is significantly deeper than the shared B of their surnames. On the outside, their language is very different but in the depths of their communicative spirit they are on a similar wavelength. We need to hear them in juxtaposition—play the tracks of this CD in an aleatoric (dis_order—to hear the way they intersect in the continually changing musical landscape of our civilisation. One strong link between them is the place of improvisation in their musical identity. Born in 1685, Bach grew up an organist in a family of musicians at a time when improvisation was an essential skill that was widely practised. Bach was renowned for his capacity to improvise fugues of up to six voices, an ability that is also evident in the depth of the contrapuntal works he crafted on paper in his daily compositional activity. Bogdanovic was born 270 years later in 1955 but seems to have inherited both the stylistic complexity and love of improvisation often associated with Bach, but at a different time and place, in a musical world of different stimuli. For Dusan Bogdanovic, both the traditional music of his native Croatia and the other component countries of the former Yugoslavia of his birth is one source, but he also has had a strong influence from the world of jazz. This suggests that we might view his music as more eclectic than that of Bach, but this warrants closer consideration.