DORMITIO: MARTIN EGIDI / BACH  

The programme for the evening centres on music in which the instrument stands alone before the structure of the work, the passage of time, and its own sonority. Two Suites for solo cello by Johann Sebastian Bach – BWV 1008 and BWV 1010 – define the concert’s dramaturgical arc, stretching from the austere, introspective expression of D minor to the architectural clarity and breadth of E flat major. Here, Bach’s suite is not a practical sequence of dances, but a meticulously conceived cycle in which the rhetoric of gesture and the logic of form coexist with the instrument’s physical immediacy. 

Works by Jean-Marie-Clément Dall’Abaco and Jean-Louis Duport introduce a perspective rooted entirely in the cello. Though shaped by a highly developed technical idiom, the Capriccio and Exercice are not reduced to mere virtuosity. Instead, they function as laboratories of sound and articulation, in which the performer explores the instrument’s limits and the expressive potential of a single melodic line. 

In Martin Egidi’s own transcription, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s Passacaglia opens a contemplative space grounded in repetition and variation of a bass pattern. Its sparing design and symbolic resonance suspend it between structural rigour and meditation. 

An artist moving freely between historical awareness and personal narrative, Martin Egidi approaches the solo repertoire as a field of concentrated attention. His interpretations reveal in this music not so much effect as meaning – meaning shaped through the relationship between gesture, silence and the inner logic of form.