BACH: Well-Tempered Clavier (complete) – Gianluca Luisi, piano – Centaur 3040/41/42/43 (4 CDs), 265:10 [Distr. by Qualiton] ****:
BACH: Well-Tempered Clavier (Book II) – Peter Watchorn, harpsichord and pedal harpsichord – Musica Omnia 0202, 3:06:34 ****:
Luisi’s complete set took me by surprise; when hearing any WTC set for the first time one’s expectations are usually confounded because of the variety of approaches the music gets bombarded with. This one promised to fit into one of the preconceived molds usually encountered—dry as dust, prim and proper, steady and secure, wildly ornate, hyper-romantic. Did I leave any categories out? Well, how about extremely expressive while using the tools of the piano, yet with a sense of color and texture that is highly illuminating. From the very first prelude, oozing with pedal, I was thinking I was transported into an earlier age, as if Godowsky had just discovered Bach and was attempting to play him.
But as I continued I realized that this was not a throwback to an earlier age but an honest modern attempt at using the piano with all of its resources to convey the spiritual essence of these remarkable pieces. There is no consideration about “how” these works should go according to a previously-imagined schema; instead Luisi takes each work itself and examines it from the standpoint of its own internal meaning and expressive nuance.
While recordings like that of Glenn Gould have a more consistent philosophy that drives each piece, Luisi also maintains a very steady and unified tone through the entire work, though one gets the impression that this is the result of micro-management instead of Gould’s macro. In other words, Luisi’s consistency is born of the fact of an individual approach to each prelude and fugue that ends tying the whole together almost as if by accident, when in fact his approach is simply the polar opposite from most other performers—like Gould. A fine reading, not one that is mandatory if you are happy with any number of others, like Gould or Hewitt, but certainly worth considering and quite well-played and recorded. I really enjoyed it.
The other issue is by the intrepid founder of the label Musica Omnia, Peter Watchorn, who plays a pedal harpsichord on some of the pieces, the first time I have heard this instrument on record since E. Power Biggs’s wonderful album of Scott Joplin from the 70s. This is a long recording—Watchorn takes all the repeats and doesn’t hurry most of his tempos, so the three discs (instead of the usual two) are well-filled, at least an hour on each. There are also issues with the tuning that are too complex to go into here; suffice it to say that this is more colorful than most harpsichord versions, a certain crispness and tangy expression absent from most recordings. Bach himself found that he had to tune the instruments he played himself as he was generally unhappy with that of others, and though the appellation “well-tempered” is applied, most musicologists do not take that to mean “equally tuned” today.
Many performers, pianists and harpsichord players alike, seem to take a more considered and even “serious” tone once they get to Book II. After all, the time difference between books is 20 years, and only the first book was titled “Well-Tempered Clavier”, the second earning only the title “24 Preludes and Fugues”. But history has melded them together, though there is often a distinct incongruity between the various methods of playing each. Though I cannot comment on Watchorn’s WTC I since I have not heard it, his view of II is especially energetic and vigorous in its performance, bringing to light the additional harmonic and contrapuntal complexities while not abandoning the more melodic and lyrical aspects of Book I, an approach I think works very well.
I will also mention that the sound is superb and the booklet scholarly and erudite while maintaining a fine readability. Recommended.
— Steven Ritter
