It’s an undertaking of sorts to listen to the entire two books of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier by Johann Sebastian Bach. They are a monumental work and an essential contribution to the musical vocabulary and the development of music of all times and all genres, including non-classical ones. But they are, after all, 48 preludes and fugues, all played in the same instrument, and in the case of the harpsichord, one with no dynamics capabilities, so trying to listen to all of them in one seating can be quite exhausting. Of course, I didn’t attempt that. I listened to 12 preludes and fugues each day, and I re-listened them at will. The experience was thus much less demanding and much more pleasing.
The music needs no comment. Only Bach could’ve written so academic a work and made it sound so fresh, so inventive, so alive. Only he could have managed to write one prelude and one fugue in each one of the 24 scales of equal temperament and made each one sound so different, so distinct when compared to the other ones. The amount of imagination displayed here is just astonishing. Even with the lack of dynamics of the harpsichord, the music carries an inner beauty and, at times, drama (especially in the minor-key works) that listening to all of the parts does not become an excruciating ordeal, but a revealing adventure. One doesn’t have to endure these works, one has to learn from them.
As for the performance, I have only a few other references to compare this with. I’ve heard some of the preludes and fugues as played by Glenn Gould on the piano, and, also, on the harpsichord. Of course the piano version possesses the dynamics that the ancient instrument can’t provide. But at the same time, the harpsichord one seems more authentic, more truly baroque, more “Bach”. Those two verswions, anyway, were played in a much more frenetic, romantic style than this one by Gustav Leonhardt, who performs a cold, scientific, rigorous reading of the Klavier books. This is very good in the faster pieces (mostly, the preludes), where we don’t endure the tendency to go too fast of other baroque interpreters. But this hurts the experience a little in the fugues, especially in some of the slower ones, which sound too mechanic, even lifeless at times.
For this reason, while I strongly recommend this four-disc set to anyone wanting to discover this great music played on (likely) its intended instrument, I advise caution and patience. Trying to cover all of them in one seating will be almost impossible to accomplish, not so much because of the music itself, which is vibrant and varied, but because of the exact, cold approach of the performer.
3.5/5
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