This Prelude is the only one of the 48 to have dynamic markings, a presumed poco forte opening modified perspectively by a piano dynamic (echo? solo vs. tutti?). The keening melodic half-steps are noted by slurs more tactile and clung than modern legato. The Fugue I have found the most challenging of all the 48 …
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 …
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 …