Tag: Keyboard music

Filippo Gorini piano
97:11 (2 CDs in a card triptych)
Alpha 755

It is a little odd to find this series of performances of Bach played on the modern grand piano by a succession of young players on the Alpha label, the home of impeccable historically informed (occasionally controversially so) performances. For my full views on Bach on the modern piano, please see my recent review of Bach: The Well-tempered Clavier Book 1, played on the piano by Aaron Pilsan also on Alpha. I won’t rehearse old arguments here, except to point out again that The Art of Fugue constitutes something of an exception to my HIP preference for period instruments. This enigmatic collection, as far as we can understand conceived by its composer as truly abstract music for the appreciation of connoisseurs and not tied in his mind to any particular instrument, transcends its time. As a result, it is played in our times on a variety of instruments and by different ensembles and still has the power to mesmerise. Thus too, these beautifully understated accounts on two CDs by Filippo Gorini beguile and charm in equal measure. I almost found myself admiring Gorini’s ability to bring out individual lines in the texture, something which Bach could not have done on any of the keyboard instruments of his time, but which a small chamber ensemble most certainly could and would have done – and which of course the eye, and the mind’s ear, of the educated connoisseur would also naturally have accomplished. If you like your Bach on modern piano, this surely must be the sort of performance you would want – wonderfully free from pianistic effects, elegantly understated and technically perfect.

D. James Ross

Colin Booth harpsichord
60:47
Soundboard SBCD 220

This recording seems not to be available from amazon.co.uk – you can buy it at Colin’s own website

Johann Mattheson is an almost exact contemporary of Handel and Bach, the former whom he lionised and the latter whom he also admired, and had possibly also met. He is also famous for providing us in his Ehrenpforte a vivid autobiography by Telemann, whom he is also likely to have known well. He is a man more quoted than performed, although in his day he was a hugely admired composer, as well as a singer, impresario, polyglot, harpsichordist, musicologist, dancer, man about town and a renowned fencer – a burst of rage in which he attacked the young Handel with a sword might well have deprived us of the output of one of the finest of Baroque composers, but for a button which turned Mattheson’s blade aside! Much of his vast output was tragically lost in the wartime bombing of Hamburg, but among surviving collections is this set of fugues and dance music, Die Wohlklingende Finger-Sprache, extravagantly dedicated to Handel. Like Mattheson, Colin Booth is also something of a polymath, combining the careers of musicologist, performer and harpsichord builder, and plays this programme on a two-manual instrument, based on a 17th-century brass-strung original. This permits a wider than usual range of timbres, and reasonably in the light of Matheson’s flamboyant personality, Booth makes full use of this fine instrument’s possibilities. This and Mattheson’s inventive imagination ensure a thoroughly entertaining CD, particularly as the fugues become more and more complex. Booth comments that Mattheson’s music is attracting growing attention, and it is to be hoped that his contributions to chamber music, church music and the opera will find wider circulation in recordings.

D. James Ross

Aaron Pilsan piano
106:58 (2 CDs in a card triptych)

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Aaron Pilsan’s complete account of Book 1 of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier on a modern grand piano is beautifully poised and measured, with a fine sense of period. I am extremely ambivalent about Bach on the modern piano – great music like this works so well on a range of media that it seems mean to rule it out as repertoire for pianists. There is a further complication with the more abstract music of Bach, which in any case seems to transcend the instruments of his time – in the case of collections like the Art of Fugue it is not even clear that the composer had a specific medium in mind, or even that this was music intended for performance at all. So am I just being churlish in my reaction to these very fine piano performances? My main reservations are the things which a piano can do which no keyboard instrument could that the conservative J. S. Bach advocated when he conceived this collection; namely, constantly raising and lowering the dynamic levels in response to individual phrases, and bringing out certain melodic threads in the polyphonic texture. In a harpsichord or organ performance, these are things which the listener has to do for him|herself – on the piano, the performer takes these decisions for you. Even with a very fine player like Pilsan, whose clear, crisp playing reveals a deep understanding of the Baroque idiom, dynamic decisions are being taken all the time, transforming the music from anything Bach could have conceived of into something entirely different. It may be something equally engaging, perhaps more engaging for some listeners, but for me Bach makes clear in his title the medium he had in mind. For those more broad-minded than I am, these Alpha recordings with their crystal clarity and Aaron Pilsan’s carefully considered and impeccably executed performances will be very attractive.

D. James Ross

Francesco Piemontesi piano
52:14
Pentatone PTC 5186 846

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On this CD Francesco Piemontesi plays mainly transcriptions of Bach by the 19th-/20th-century composer and piano virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni, as well as one transcription each by pianist Wilhelm Kempff and organist Egon Petri, an homage by Busoni to Bach and even some straight Bach, albeit on the piano. A thoughtful programme note tries to put this music in the context of its time, when the concept of authentic performance had not yet been conceived of, and performers from Mendelssohn to Liszt felt free to adapt, arrange and otherwise muck about with earlier music under the guise of bringing it to a wider audience. We would recall Mendelssohn’s ‘performance edition’ of Bach’s St Matthew Passion with its clarinets and its string quartet renditions of continuo recitative accompaniments. Nowadays it is deeply out of fashion to meddle too much with earlier musical sources, the idea of playing Baroque music on a modern piano being perhaps a dying vestige of a previous attitude. It can hardly be surprising that as a child of the HIP movement, I find Bach on the piano, let alone transcribed for the piano, a bit of a musical cul-de-sac. Interesting to find a CD where these transcriptions themselves are treated as a historical phenomenon, and where they are performed with a HIP perspective. Busoni’s own Toccata is an interesting example of Bach through the looking glass, and we would perhaps recall Bach’s own transcriptions of earlier music – how would Vivaldi have felt hearing his violin concertos arranged for clutches of harpsichords?

D. James Ross