JS Bach • A D bicz

JS Bach: Inventions Nos 1-15, Sinfonias Nos 1-15;

A De˛bicz: Toccatas 1-4

Aleksander D bicz (piano)

Warner Classics 9029560146 60:33 mins A Youtube film shows Aleksander D bicz walking around Warsaw ahead of recording his album Cinematic Piano. Inf luenced by film music as well as hip-hop, D bicz’s own toccatas recorded here are very conservative in idiom, yet their rhythmic verve is hard to resist.

If only one could say the same about his playing of Bach’s Inventions, but a general lack of a sense of line and shading results in some lacklustre accounts, not helped by an almost complete absence of even the most basic ornamentation. True, D bicz plays Bach’s own ornamented alternative version of the E flat Two-part Invention, but elsewhere the music all too often sounds conspicuously plain when wholly unadorned. The expressive high-point of all these pieces is the tragic F minor Three-part Invention, yet even here D bicz’s account plods unremittingly. The E major Twopart Invention is actually so slow that he deems it wise to omit the second repeat; and his performance of the lyrical B flat piece from the same collection is lacking in warmth and affection. On the plus side, his admirable finger-staccato stands him in good stead in such pieces as the D minor Two-part Invention as well as the E minor, but it’s not enough to lift these performances to a higher plane. Misha Donat

PERFORMANCE ★★

RECORDING ★★★★