A fresh approach to some of Bach’s best
Pianist Piotr Anderszewski makes a persuasive case, says Michael Church
JS Bach The Well-tempered Clavier, Book II – excerpts
Piotr Anderszewski (piano)
Warner Classics 9029511875 75:08 mins Piotr wrong-footing Anderszewski his audiences. delights in Sometimes dramatically, viz beginning a Barbican recital lounging on a sofa and sipping tea, as though waiting for someone else to sit at the piano. Sometimes musically: silencing Wigmore applause by announcing that he hadn’t played a Bach partita well enough, so he would play it all again as an encore.
This recording creatively wrongfoots our expectations, offering 12 preludes and fugues from Book II of Bach’s 48 in an entirely new order. ‘It seems to me,’ he says in a liner note, that they were published in an order which is ‘not one in which the pieces follow each other with an emotional, musical inevitability.’ His new ordering is sometimes based on key relationships, and sometimes on ‘contrasts which seem to draw the pieces irresistibly together.’ He sees them as character pieces, and wishes to give the impression of those characters in conversation.
For this listener at least, Anderszewski’s interpretations and juxtapositions have a compelling inevitability; but the other reason for the recording’s success lies in his pianism. Anderszewski’s flexible, responsive touch and his often slowish tempos allow a subtle suggestiveness. The contrapuntal voices are vividly characterised, and Bach’s paired contrasts are lovely: grave ceremoniousness followed by a bright awakening in No. 1, sweet intimacy followed by an explosion of colour in No. 12. The whole set is beautiful certain pieces from stand start to out: finish, a brilliantly but exuberant prelude to No. 18, and a serenely floating cantabile in its fugue; the fugue of No. 17 like a merry peal of bells. Glorious.
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
The whole set is beautiful from start to finish