But I want to play something else by Bach. The Well-Tempered Clavier, a set of preludes and fugues in every key, is one of the most monumental keyboard pieces ever written. And to show it wasn't a fluke, twenty or so years later, Bach did it all over again. There have been a few attempts in the last 300 years to match this achievement, but the only successful one was by Shostakovich.
Here is the transcendental pianist Grigory Sokolov playing book one in a concert in Munich in 1990.
UPDATE: Something I didn't realize until I had finished listening to the whole clip: this only goes up to the D# minor fugue, so only half of Book I.
4 comments:
Mahan Esfahani has a recording of WTC Book 1 out as it happens. I haven't listened to it all yet, but it's very good and interesting, as you'd expect. His harpsichord has a particularly splendid sound.
Thanks for the tip Steven. I will have to give that a listen.
A good question is just how many sets of 24 preludes and fugues were written in the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Rodion Shchedrin died recently and his 24 Preludes and Fugues have some great stuff in them and some of it's ... pretty meh. The Zaderatsky 24 P&F has some good stuff. Neither cycle has the consistency of thematic inspiration for all the subjects that DSCH had but Shchedrin and Zaderatsky's best moments rival the Shostakovich cycle, and I write that as a Shostakovich fan.
Offhand it seems bids at 24 P&F was more common in the Soviet bloc during the Soviet period. Western attempts have been less successful or found far fewer exponents. Nobody has recorded the David Diamond fugal cycle, for instance. Hindemith's isn't even 24 but it's a respectable cycle (I mean, I am a Hindemith buff). Henry Martin's 24 Preludes and Fugues are at least worth checking out. Not at the level of DSCH but to even compose cycles of this kind establishes a certain kind of floor for compositional and instrumental technique.
Thanks, Wenatchee. I knew you would have some good examples to add! Re the Soviet Union, social realism was a doctrine that encouraged the use of older forms while modernism did the opposite.
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