J.S.Bach Chaconne BWV1004 - Carlo Ambrosio Guitar - Performed on a 2025 Oscar Muñoz instrument

I was just an unaware young cob when I witnessed a charming and emotional lesson about the Chaconne, delivered by the righteously famous Sándor Végh. Of course, I had already come across this work from records and friends in the violin classes, as well as through transcriptions and performances of some guitarists, but I had never realized, since then, how immense is the universe enclosed in it, and how heavy any aware performer’s burden should be, bound for unveiling the heaven inside it.
So often I have quarrelled with my only guitar teacher about pieces I should (or I rather should not…) have in my repertoire, but never about the Chaconne. He was not performing it, at that time, and I was so intimidated by that composition that I never quoted it in our conversations, neither its name been pronounced.
I had been given a copy of the violin score by a friend (still have that score…), reading it with the guitar “just to see how the original score would fit…” I was telling myself. I was studying ‘cello as well, in those years, and the lack of a bow in my right hand, when I was playing the guitar, began to be painful and frustrating. Nonetheless, I have to thank that period for how well I learned to vibrate and perform portamentos, to produce any kind of timbre and dynamic, striving to compensate the lack of that damn bow!
A couple of decades ago, while preparing the Northern Europe winter tour, flashed in my mind the utterly insane self-harming idea of performing in the same gig the four iconic pillars of my all-time repertoires: Nocturnal, Paganini’s Gran Sonata, Rossiniane 1, Ponce’s Folias de España. Reading the four titles in a row I thought that I could have done even better than that: I could have replaced Paganini with some Bach’s work… And so, after trying in all possible manners, both legal and illegal, to play my stupid guitar “with the bow”, almost 40 years after that enlightening Sándor Végh’s masterclass, I eventually started performing the Chaconne. I played it almost 60 times, that winter, and none of all those performances, I felt, was the like of the previous one, neither served as an inspiration for the next one. Still today, while performing it, I feel like being inside a long theatrical monologue about myself, my life, my weaknesses, my failures, my accomplishments, my most inner shames, feeling naked in front of an audience of peers. I felt in a similar way only performing the last two movements of the Nocturnal, but never with so much power and such intensity.
Recording the Chaconne is a definitely different issue from performing it. During this last year I’ve had several thoughts about the interpretative and philological line to tow. Still, at the end of the day, I decided to go for the Violin-like performance (so what? The Chaconne IS for Violin!!! If Bach wanted it in a different way he could have transcribed it for Harpsichord or organ, of let some of his side kickers students do the job for Lute, then it could have been stuffed and filled up with whatsoever kind of ornamentation… But Bach wanted it for Violin, only! In my imagination I figure out a shy Kapsberger going to him with the Chaconne in his hand and his lute in the other, attempting to ask… “Maestro… how about if I…” “HANDS OFF THAT PIECE!!!”)
I do not believe that there can ever exist, in the experience of any musician, the achievement of a ‘perfect recording’, a kind of ‘testament’ sculpted in marble in the grooves or soundtracks of whatever audio or video media. It is the affection and empathy of whoever listens which often turns an excellent performance into a discographical ‘myth’. Ours is the most intangible, elusive, ethereal art. It creates that which does not exist, which lives only reflected in the memory of who has listened to it and which, if not recorded, could not be repeated. The object of whoever plays in front of a microphone, therefore, should only be that of speaking the most sincere music possible and, taking it straight to the heart of whoever is listening to what is being performed at that moment, keeping the performance suspended in time, as if in a soap bubble, waiting for someone to catch it and make it his own. I hope the thrill of this quizzical and illusory non-existence will flow through the notes of the performance featured in this video.

Recorded and filmed in the IX century Basilica di Castel S.Elia, Italy, on 12th November 2025. Sound recorded through a pair of Neumann U87i placed 7 feet from source.