Paul Galbraith’s Breakthrough Bach (Continued from last week’s post):
So it was Lindsay the freshly-inspired Bach missionary who headed happily back to work at the store the next morning: it was a Saturday – our busiest day. The Galbraith CDs immediately went into my classical room’s listening station, as well as my in-store play system so that customers would hear it as they browsed. And – more than any other recording I’d ever carried – the CD proceeded to sell itself briskly. Time and again, I would watch as customers entered the classical room, and – within a few seconds – many of them simply stopped in their tracks, dumbstruck, listening for a few moments. Then they would turn to me with wonder in their faces, asking “What’s THAT!?!”
I would then explain Galbraith’s unique eight-stringed instrument and revolutionary upright playing position: how its features (like the endpin and resonance box) make it sound fuller and richer than conventional guitars, with firmer bass foundations plus much broader dynamic and low-to-high-note ranges. I would also discuss Galbraith’s supreme technical and interpretive achievements: the startling clarity and smoothness of his playing – its grand, majestic sweep and unfathomable emotional depth – the pervasive sense of dance. With my fellow Bach-junky customers, I would even point out the way his cunning arrangements often expand upon the “implied” contrapuntal structure of music that Bach originally wrote for solo violin: essentially a single-voice instrument – and how he did it without ever compromising the composer’s original compositional integrity.
Bingo! The near-inevitable result was yet another sale … and, even better, yet another captivated customer suddenly converted to the cult of Galbraith’s Bach! My initial order of 20 CDs was completely sold out by the time the weekend was over. And the CD’s success never let up: I always kept multiple copies in stock, and it turned out to be the store’s single best-selling classical CD over the next two years. It also set the store up nicely (my loyal customers, too) for the gush of Galbraith’s CDs to follow: exploring composers like Haydn, Debussy and Brahms – and even a sweet foray into folk music. And then there was the successful series of CDs featuring esoteric transcriptions of all sorts of music for the Brazilian Guitar Quartet, of which Galbraith was a founding member.
And I’m still not finished with it. It remains one of my ten or twelve all-time personal CD faves that have earned a permanent place atop my stereo cabinet. I often play it for dinner guests and other visitors – and I never cease to marvel at the effect it has on all kinds of music lovers. I never get tired of it: part of the many-splendored miracle of Bach’s music is that you never hear it quite the same way twice. This historic release – plus many others in Delos’s glittering catalog – fuel my boundless excitement at the prospect of writing for one of the world’s very finest and most fascinating recording companies.
–Lindsay Koob
Listen to samples from Paul Galbraith’s albums in our 36-for-36 post “The Remarkable Paul Galbraith.”