The third volume that Francesco Tristano dedicates to his beloved Johann Sebastian Bach, after the 6 Partitas and the 6 English Suites, includes the entire seven Toccatas, BWV 910-916, early works probably dating from the period 1707-1715. Here, the Luxembourger celebrates above all the pugnacious joy of the young Bach, devastating.

With their contrasting, almost incandescent colors, the photographs by Breno Rotatori that adorn the third part that Francesco Tristano dedicates to his beloved Johann Sebastian Bach are apt mirrors to the pugnacious joy that bursts forth under the pianist's fingers in the Toccatas (BWV 910-916). These seven scores, whose precise origin and date remain uncertain [no original manuscript has survived], probably date back to 1707. A young man then just over twenty years old, deeply imbued with North German music, Bach then found his first permanent position in Mühlhausen, as an organist. His growing appetite for keyboard instruments, his meeting two years earlier with Buxtehude who definitively gave him the keys to the North German style (more or less the stylus fantasticus), motivated the young composer to write more ambitious, virtuoso pieces, which combined the rigor of Italian and German masters like Frescobaldi, Reincken or Froberger, and an extraordinary ingenuity in the art of counterpoint, which would become the keystone of his creative thinking.

The Toccatas remain a legendary puzzle for pianists. According to Francesco Tristano, "the important thing here is the use of the term toccata, from the verb toccare, which means to touch, and by extension to play. To play for fun, to entertain oneself." Faced with the acrobatic ascents and descents on two staves, or the swirling and inexhaustible fugues, invented here by the future Cantor, Tristano deploys on the instrumental level an inflexible tenacity, a sign of a truly insatiable appetite for the unusual, through the expected, throughout these seven scores. The Luxembourger undoubtedly found the dazzling ardor and fierce determination required by the seven Toccatas during the five days in June 2025 during which he made this recording, at the Yamaha Sound Crossing building in the heart of Tokyo's Shibuya district. As the previously published cycles of great Suites1 already proclaimed, filled with lively accents, swept by a sharp science of character, an intrinsically phantasticus part innervates the playing of Francesco Tristano – here even more immediate, frank, baroque, without limits! 1 after the 6 Partitas and the 6 English Suites, the 6 French Suites will appear in 2026.