Colors of Bach

Bach Is a Blue Without a Name

If you laid music history out as a row of color swatches, Bach would sit in the exact middle: not a vivid red, not a deep black, but a blue that can take on any emotion you stain it with.

That is exactly what Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing and the Norwegian String Quintet do on Colors of Bach — twenty-three dye experiments on that blue.

Not Copying — Recoloring

The word “Colors” in the title is not decorative. The album brought in three arrangers — Tim Allhoff, Jan-Peter Klöpfel, and Jarkko Riihimäki — to “recolor” roughly twenty of Bach’s best-known melodies into contemporary textures.

The Goldberg Variations’ Aria becomes a jazz-tinted piano miniature; the First Brandenburg Concerto is turned into a frolic for string quintet; that gentlest of chorales from Cantata BWV 147 — Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring — is tuned down to near chamber-music transparency.

Interestingly, there are no cello suites here — the soloist is a violin. All twenty-three tracks grow from Bach melodies, closing with a faithful account of the complete Violin Concerto No. 2 in E major (BWV 1042), the album’s un-altered anchor point.

A 1707 Stradivarius

Hemsing was born in Valdres, Norway, studied in Vienna under Boris Kuschnir, and plays the 1707 Stradivarius “Rivaz, Baron Gutmann.” Her tone is sumptuous and warm; next to the quintet’s billowing texture, Bach’s lines feel breathed rather than engraved.

She has a history of firsts: among the premiere performers of Tan Dun’s Violin Concerto, and a recording artist of Fire Ritual. Colors of Bach is her dive into Bach’s ocean — not a conquest, but a dyeing.

Hemsing’s Two Taipei Nights

August 2024, Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall. Two concerts in the Taipei Symphony Orchestra’s “Summer Music Stroll” series: the first night Sibelius’s Violin Concerto; the second, the Taiwan premiere of Tan Dun’s Fire Ritual.

Taiwanese audiences’ acquaintance with that Stradivarius was sealed in those two days.

Oslo in August

In late August 2026, the Oslo Chamber Music Festival presents a full evening of Colors of Bach; in mid-September the program travels to Kristiansund. If you are in Scandinavia this autumn, you may hear Bach’s recolored palettes live.

Further Listening

For another road of “Bach in modern translation,” Yo-Yo Ma’s 2018 remake of the cello suites is a completely different route — he stripped away bowings and breathing marks and re-read the score through decades of experience. Jan Lisiecki’s Preludes, meanwhile, sets Bach’s preludes beside Chopin and Rachmaninoff, letting you hear one seed growing into different branches across three centuries.