Where does the composer’s work end — and the performer’s begin? - Bach’s Fantasias take this question to its limits. Little known and sometimes disconcerting, they have the fire and unpredictability of music that seems to be taking shape before our ears. Some give the performer a remarkable degree of freedom: Bach writes down only a handful of chords — leaving it to the musician to complete the score. Interpretation then becomes an act of creation. Fantasie | Bach was born out of this dialogue: a bold and committed exploration of this little-known repertoire, in which Zeljko Drion-Manic brings a deeply personal vision to these works. Wherever the score invites it, he fully embraces the creative freedom entrusted to the performer.** He takes this idea further through several entirely free improvisations, allowing his own musical language to emerge in the moment of recording, in dialogue with Bach’s music, the surroundings and an exceptional instrument: the 1624 Ioannes Ruckers harpsichord at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar. Fantasie | Bach thus approaches the past as something that remains alive and in motion.

French-Serbian harpsichordist, singer and composer, Zeljko Drion-Manic brings a man of the theatre’s instinct to the hands of a harpsichordist. At the crossroads of keyboard, voice and stage, he asserts a distinctive musical personality, shaped by a vocal sensibility, a keen sense of drama, and an unabashed taste for risk and freedom. Vivid, committed and intensely rhetorical, his playing places virtuosity at the service of musical discourse and expressive power. For Zeljko, to interpret is to dare to persuade: to make the harpsichord no longer an instrument of the past, but a voice of the present.