The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I

by

Johann Sebastian Bach

Edit

My head is ringing with preludes and fugues by Bach at the moment. Just a week ago I attended a festival of keyboard counterpoint at the Royal Northern College of Music, and over the last year or two the BBC has been broadcasting a midnight series of the 48 played by Gavrilov, Demidienko and Joanna McGregor. One thing is very apparent from it all - Bach's preludes and fugues don't get many bad performances, in public at least. Angela Hewitt is in a very distinguished line of north American Bach-players on the piano. During the 50's and 60's Rosalynn Tureck kept the tradition of playing Bach on the piano alive as the purist bandwagon gathered momentum, and slightly later Hewitt's great Canadian compatriot Glenn Gould gave that tradition a spectacular new impetus, and by now matters are where they ought to be, with instruments seen and heard as the servants of music and not the reverse.

It's difficult to give the right impression of a set of performances where there is really nothing to criticise. Hewitt works within strict parameters of moderation and impeccable taste and sense of style. That is not faint praise, but very emphatic praise indeed. There is plenty of variety in her touch, and plenty of light and shade in her dynamics and tempi. What she doesn't go in for is the dramatic contrasts of loud and soft so favoured by Tureck, nor the sometimes spectacular tempi adopted by Gould. Her technique is absolutely perfect, but her touch is not one that you could identify in an instant the way you can often identify Gould's. Now and again she raises her voice to some purpose, as when she adds an extra octave in the bass (very properly) at the end of the D major fugue, and we get an impression of what she could she could do along with the best of them if she saw fit. In general, though, this is the exception. Her way with the first book of the 48 is neither unduly severe nor tending towards the romantic, as one may feel Richter does. This is a musical world of its own. It contains limitless variety in everything except the consistently magnificent standard of the pieces, but it's a world that stays within its own orbit and this player goes on no trips outside that orbit. Whatever the piece seems to ask for, Angela Hewitt seems to have it. She tells us that she detects a danger that the second prelude, in C minor, can be made to sound ugly. Nobody I've listened to lately did that, and I suspect Hewitt wouldn't even know how. She is not without individuality in her own terms either, as you will hear right away in the famous first prelude. I have always been very attracted to Gould's highly individual way of doing this, each arpeggio half-legato and half-staccato. In case it was time for a change, here is a very beautiful alternative, light and ethereal.

She is particularly effective in the C sharp major prelude too, and actually tells us to some extent how she achieves her effect. Her liner-booklet is one of the best I have ever seen. It's informative, thoughtful, unpretentious, practical and down-to-earth, and all the better in that respect for being concerned with music that is anywhere but down to earth. Sometimes she lets us into her thinking as to why she adopts a certain approach - she favours a constant pulse in the big E flat prelude, for instance, and she ends the C sharp minor fugue quietly because (according to Czerny) Beethoven did it that way and it makes the best sense to her done like that in any case.

This is an absolute joy of a set, in case I haven't made that clear already. There are other fine sets around (e.g. Schiff apart from others already mentioned) and it's unlikely that any listener will like one interpreter's account of all 48 pieces best in every single case. The very special individuality of Gould is very special for me, and I am the sort of Gould-follower who can take more or less anything from him in Bach. For a distinguished version that places less weight on personal taste and temperament, and particularly for a version to recommend to newcomers as some kind of generally-acceptable ideal without idiosyncrasies, this one is going to take some beating.

There are always two kinds of pianists in this world. The ones, prodigiously talented, praised by critics and satisfied with themselves, never question what they are doing, therefore stuck in one place without ever reaching depth of music making which can stand test of time. (Kissin, Ashkenazy, Argerich etc)

The others who keep asking questions and aspire to reach higher realm of music making, trying to capture fleeting moment of the divine. (Richter, Rubinstein, Pogorelich, Volodos etc)

To me Hewitt belongs to the former. The elegance, fluency and subtlety of her playing are admirable enough, but that's all there is. Her recordings and her live performances Bach give me the impression that she is just content scratching surface of the music despite her refined style. Pretty playing but not for me.