String players wielding baroque bows don’t often share the stage with a pianist playing a modern Steinway grand, but that was the setup for this immersion in JS Bach’s keyboard concertos – six of them, performed by the pianist Alexandros Kapelis and the Berliner Barock Solisten.
Formed of players moonlighting from the Berlin Philharmonic, the Solisten play on modern instruments but in historically informed style – hence those bows. As for Kapelis, he combined the ornate decoration you would expect from a harpsichord – agile, swerving scales; filigree trills and ornaments that pinged off the starting note – with techniques available only on the modern piano, making subtle but frequent use of the sustaining pedal and, in a couple of ravishing quiet slow-movement passages, bringing the mute pedal into play. The effect was like the costumes in Bridgerton: authentic silhouette; bright, modern palette.
