Christopher O'Riley The Prelude begins with a Concerto movement feeling, and its binary form, rare in Book One but generously invoked in Book Two presents an opportunity for embellishment and improvisation. I recorded both of the Ab’s over the course of three days, the two Preludes on the first day. The Fugues took each a full day …
The tragedy and majesty of the g minor Prelude immediately asserts itself. I shape the voices and distinguish them by use of connectivity and discontinuity, the tympanum of the dotted notes riding a spectrum from militaristic to ultra-lyric. The admonishment of repeated notes that make up the 2nd half of the Fugue’s subject is leavened …
I’ve interrupted my Yukio Mishima binge for good reason. Steeped as I am in the Well-Tempered Clavier, I’ve come to know some of essential contemporary texts on Bach’s process, his reaction and interaction with the cultural trends of his time, and specific analysis devoted to the WTC. Laurence Dreyfus’ excellent Bach And The Patterns Of …
This Prelude enlists another one of the known techniques of the time, making a blooming sound out of a completely natural, colloquial position of the hand. The parallel voices I seek to subvert, instead of following their inexorable tandem procession, I highlight 3-note melodic cells, through articulative transparency and dynamic shading, first in the upper …
Maybe my favorite of all the cantabile Preludes; reminds me of the Minore Variation #25 in the Goldberg Variations. The multivarious subjects of the Fugue run from the stentorian rhetorical to the motive, emblematic to the fluid and accumulative semi-quavers. And those new Steinway hammers are coming in nicely, I think. All my video performances …
Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier is distinguished by Bach’s ever-evolving experiments, alchemical meldings of genres, styles, forms and formats. The F# Major Prelude, with its martially-dotted thorough-going texture suggests a French Overture, but in performance one finds instead this most stringently regulated yet most opulently resounding two-voice texture. The Fugue begins on the trilled …