Three Or One hears Johann Sebastian Bach through 24 transcriptions by the British pianist Fred Thomas, for piano trio or piano alone. Most of the trio pieces come from the Orgelbüchlein, the organ chorale preludes that Thomas counts among Bach's "most concisely radical creations". With violinist Aisha Orazbayeva and cellist Lucy Railton, both better known in contemporary music, he turns organ music into chamber music without dressing it up. The album was his debut on ECM New Series.
The recordings were made in 2012 and 2018 at the University of Huddersfield, with Thomas as recording producer and Alex Bonney as recording and mixing engineer. Manfred Eicher, executive producer, chose from this material and threaded it into a new hour-long sequence. Thomas wanted to separate the voices that an organ in a church tends to blend, and to subvert the associations of the piano trio, a medium remote from Bach. He sees the trio's wide experience as "an incitement to creativity", and asks whether Bach would ever have played the same thing the same way twice.
Nineteen chorale settings are played by the trio, framed by two Schübler chorales, Ach bleib bei uns, Herr Jesu Christ at the start and Meine Seele erhebt den Herren at the close. The strings play long, sustained lines with little vibrato. In Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ the piano imitates an organ mutation stop, while the falling motif of Durch Adams Fall moves into pizzicato cello. At the centre Thomas plays alone: the Sinfonia from Cantata BWV 196 and four cantata arias, among them Wie furchtsam wankten meine Schritte from BWV 33.
In Gramophone, Jed Distler noted that the strings play "with perfect intonation and minimum vibrato", and suggested that the music will "quietly insinuate itself" over several hearings. Kurt Gottschalk wrote in Stereophile that the set had been sequenced into "a convincing, hour-long suite". Paul Riley in BBC Music Magazine found the results mesmerizing at times and called Thomas an illuminating, if idiosyncratic, Bachian.
This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2640, released on 22 October 2021, with liner notes by Fred Thomas.
