Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2, BWV.870-893
It is a bit of a shock to the system – auditory, mental, emotional – to sit down and listen to two and a quarter-ish hours of Bach piano music, 48 separate pieces, which are without any sort of narrative or clear structure (unlike the Goldberg Variations, where the end is the beginning). Neither book of the Well Tempered Clavier was ever composed as a piece for audiences to listen to (though the programme booklet did point out that some of the preludes borrowed material from other works Bach did write for public consumption such as his church cantatas.). They were meant as teaching tools and as an incentive to rigorous study and playing. Whereas I would never dream of doing this with the Goldbergs or the Passions, I have tended to listen to the WTC books at home while cleaning, or doing personal admin things, mainly using the recordings by Gulda, Gould and Tureck. So I both know in a way and yet don’t know Book 2, and certainly there were some preludes and fugues i don’t recall ever having heard before sitting through this concert. In a sense it felt like going to a large art gallery you’d never been to before and having to take a moving walkway to see everything – it’s as though the whole world is there, sometime delighting you, maybe sometimes boring you, and too often the image has whooshed past before you have really made up your mind how to react. In the two and a quarter hours I must have lost concentration maybe for about a total of 10 minutes, but that still meant i was enjoying over two hours of this work. And I did enjoy it – there are some beautifully ethereal preludes, and some that have that quintessential Bachian melancholy. I loved some of the more ferocious fugues – 4 or 5 seemingly random notes announced and then a following blitz pf a fugue….
Pierre-Laurent Aimard has a considerable reputation for his Bach performances (and indeed I have a recording of his playing The Art of the Fugue). There were a few times when, in some of the Preludes I knew, he seemed to me to be playing on the fast side and to my ears not lingering sufficiently (eg prelude no 3, compare Tureck). But his performance sounded energetic, straight-forward and clear and he got a standing ovation at the end from many in the audience ( I noticed a number of people around me following scores). Perhaps he lacks the outrageousness you can sense in Gould’s playing, or the quiet seriousness of Tureck, but I enjoyed these two hours of total absorption very much indeed (and have only unqualified admiration for somebody prepared to play this much music with the degree of intensity displayed before a live audience). It was a very diverse audience too – lots of younger people and more of a mix of ethnicity than you might sometimes see on the South Bank
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