To record and therefore to fix in time one's own version of the Bach repertoire, that is to say that music which has accompanied us from childhood, is inevitably a moment of great importance in one's own musical life, and something which is faced up to with a certain timidity.

Such timidity springs from the monumental character of the composer but also from the repertoire itself which has so often been recorded that any further recording will inevitably lead to a comparison with those productions which already crowd the market. The recording market, instead, is looking for a novelty linked to musical rediscovery, or an event connected with an unexpected or unforeseen encounter of artists. One should say that this recording belongs more to the second category ? the unexpected encounter of my oboe with the music which J.S.Bach and K.P.E.Bach had originally intended for the flute. Will this experiment manage to convince the flautists who have been 'robbed' of their repertoire, or even the musicologists, given that I have not used instruments of the age in which the music was composed (a practice of which, however, I am an enthusiastic supporter). Equally, you could well imagine the state of mind of the performer during the sarabanda of the partita BMC 1013 by J.A.Bach, when to the retornello he adds the diminutions (which although they are improvised will be listened to again always in the same form!), or when during the second and third movements of the sonata by K.P.E.Bach he corrects notes which he believes are out of harmony, or fills up pauses in order to continue a progression which he perhaps interrupts in order to allow the flautist to get his breath back? I believe that on the threshold of one's forties to measure up to music which is so important is almost a need, so that one can test oneself and find a point of reference by establishing the level of one's own performance. Like a photographic portrait in which one tries to appear at one's best and which nonetheless when seen again reveals only one's defects, so also a recording is a photograph of a musical moment in the life of an artist in which the artist himself perceives only his negative aspects. It is up to you to convince me that the opposite is the case!

Paolo Pollastri