Found a great Bach interpreter!

Very interesting thread.

vagfilm I am in awe with Zhu Xiao-Mei.

+1 (for what I've hear so far). I find Koriolov version great too. I also like Gould's 1955 recording.

On the other hand, I don't like too much Angela Hewitt's version or Simone Dinnerstein's one (which I thought I would have loved and bought as hard copy).

Unlike you all, I can't point to a reason why I like one and another or dislike something else. With such a small sample such as this, I am sure you can find a pattern, but believe me, when looking at the whole list of things that I like or not, it feels random. My piano teacher says that I like the ones in which the performer "meant it" rather than simply executed it pretending it to be in a certain way. In fact, I like/dislike some recordings, regardless of the scholarly-antiscolarly, rubato-strict, romantic-baroque execution with expressive-flat dynamics. Fascinating justification, which I choose to believe even if I don't have scientific proof of its truth. Not as much as a leap of faith if you compare with language: imagine someone declaiming a poem in your native language. You may or may not like the style, but even for the best actors you could immediately tell if they "meant it" (e.g. like it) or if they are just reciting it, no?

CyberGene

Your F Minor Prelude (#12 from Book 1) is played beautifully. Really. It made me listen closely from beginning to end.

Re the Gould Effect, I'm 71, Toronto born and raised; so as a child learning the piano it was impossible NOT to play--at least to try to play--Bach like Gould. I remain a fan of his Goldberg V., all three versions. And I like his Partitas as well as, horror of horrors, his Beethoven Sonatas and Piano Concertos. As for the Bible--the Well-tempered--I don't like much, or perhaps most, of Gould's rendering. Mind you: some of the conceptually challenging fugues, for example, the E major (#9) from Book 2, he really "nails," for want of a better word.

The many of the big names (Hewitt and Schiff come immediately to mind) leave me completely cold. The reason is simple: I want to hear the "architecture" or "the whole" when I listen to the WTC. (Like a well-played chess game?) I'm not particularly interested in exquisite ornamentation, delicate phrasing, particularly where it takes my attention away from the structural aspects of Bach's music.

That's a personal preference, of course. There's no "right" or "wrong" in musical taste, as far as I'm concerned. Every performer and listener is engaged in what (at base) is an exercise of their own personal imagination, and everyone's imagination is different. That's just how I see it.

I own at least 50 different CD versions of the WTC (Books 1 and 2). I stopped collecting once everything went online.

Here's a WILD (but wonderful) WTC 2 not yet mentioned above (Feinberg):

https://youtu.be/rAZJcpbDAxY?si=T1bB32pBBUZyagxV

Book 1? I find myself returning again and again to the poorly recorded and sonically reverberant Church version by S. Richter: He recorded the WTC a number of times. This is the only version I like (and I probably shouldn't):

https://youtu.be/1osi_pQcUdM?si=3NfBLAOYIcmv_Wnb

Here's MY own sequenced WTC 1 and 2:

jlg I think I remember your WTC recordings from PW, a tremendous job 👏🏻

Thank you for your other recommendations. I actually know Richter well since he’s my mom’s favorite, as a teen she watched him live in Bulgaria and was lucky to be seated in a chair next to the piano (because it was overcrowded and they had to accommodate everyone and instructed her to not make any noise whatsoever or she’ll be out) and always remembers that experience as some magic that has happened to her, how every note he played was divine, etc 😉 So, I started my Bach WTC journey with Gould and Richter but I immediately dismissed the latter for using the sustain pedal. However, from the distance of time, I seem to have been just a little dogmatic boy 🤣 Richter is a genius and I think his playing has influenced that of Koroliov which is why I alluded to “Soviet Bach School”.

I’m still on a crossroads with Hewitt’s WTC. Sometimes I love her sentimental approach, only to find it questionable (and even random) the next day. But the Fazioli piano sound in her recordings is the best piano I’ve ever heard for Bach.

I envy your mother!

Schiff eschews the pedal. Barenboim goes crazy with it. Richter’s somewhere in the middle. Koroliov over Hewitt in my books. No comparison. My entirely subjective preference.

CyberGene

CyberGene Richter and Gould: an interesting philosophical contrast. Richter famously hated recording; Gould, as we all know, thought the concert hall a decidedly inferior musical tradition and means of communication; and he LOVED recording. (Nonetheless, as far as we can tell, they seemed to like and respect each other.) I like both media: live and recorded. I guess I prefer the concert hall, not because it's "live" music, but because a great hall with a great piano, a great pianist, and a great seat = great audio. I have a pretty good audio system, but even the best audio is second best to a great concert hall. The problem is, as always, that many listeners don't have ready access to great halls with great instruments and a listener's preferred interpretations may only exist in recorded form. With that framework in mind, Gould's preferences are common sense, but probably nothing more. Recording entails of necessity editing of course, and nowadays anything is possible. Not a problem, in my books; although I prefer artists to be honest about what KIND of editing, and the EXTENT of it. It's a little disconcerting to young aspiring pianists who may routinely practice six or eight hours a day to discover, for example, that the perfect octave-playing and four octave runs in thirds they might of heard in a recent recording of last movement of Brahms's B flat concerto were the result of extensive editing, not hard practice!

QuasiUnaFantasia Does anyone have experience with the Gulda WTC recordings from the early 1970's? They were unusual in that the microphones were placed extremely close to the strings (on a Bösendorfer Imperial). I have only recently heard about these recordings, but not yet listened to them.

I've been listening to Gulda's WTC for decades, since I was ten. Bk II was my first ever classical music recording purchase. I'm an unusual case in that, by the time I got to Gould, his performances were "wrong" to me, which is the reverse of how it is for most people with the WTC, I imagine. Gould is usually the standard.

As you say, the recordings are extremely dry and mic'ed right over the hammers. I personally think it really fits the music. It strips away everything but the counterpoint. Every other recording of WTC, regardless of the performance, sounds at least a little mushy and overly thick to me in comparison.

Gulda's performances are often idiosyncratic. He kind of has two speeds: slow, soft and deliberate, with lots of una corda; or rapid and hard. To be sure, he exhibits a bit more subtlety in between, but he's strongly pulled toward either of those two poles.

An example of an outlier performance is Fugue II, Bk I. Most performers take a medium tempo and use more legato phrasing. Gulda plays it slower, softer and much more detached, gradually ramping up the volume until he's practically pounding by the end.

His tempo is some of the most regular I've ever heard. He's a human computer, and that's not a slight, as I really enjoy the precision.

I've read his playing described as more vertical, emphasizing how the counterpoint lines up in any given beat, rather than horizontal, emphasizing individual lines. I feel this is an accurate assessment.

I'm in a weird place with Gulda. For me, it's familiar. Listening through either book is like comfort food. But I also know that his performance is at times really unusual. It's a case where, for me, what's weird is normal.

Argyris I think I've never listened to Gulda, or maybe I've done but not systematically so. Might give it a try just to familiarize myself with his Bach.

CyberGene He's an odd case when it comes to Bach. Apart from a few one-off live performances, some of which are available on YouTube, he basically recorded both books of WTC and then nothing else by the composer. No complete English Suites (I think he did the third one live) or French Suites, none of the Two-Part Inventions or Sinfonias, no Goldberg Variations, nothing.

It's like out of the blue running a marathon, turning in an impressive time, and then, despite this accomplishment, never doing it again.

I recently got a 10-disk set of his recitals in Stuttgart, where he played a lot of Beethoven sonata's, but also other stuff, including a good number of Bach works, and a "Prelude and fugue" of his own (think Bach writes jazz). His playing is technically magnificent, but his choices are at times really odd (including sometimes using an electrically amplified instrument of some sort). I can't really say that I bought his choices completely, but his renditions are certainly interesting.

CyberGene YouTubeBach - Prelude in Fm, BWV 857 [Played by Evgeni Kumanov]Bach - Well-Tempered Clavier, Prelude No.12 in F minor.Played on a Yamaha N1X controlling Garritan CFX virtual piano.This is an amateur recording. I'm a self...

That's wonderful!

I love Richter's recording -especially Book 1. He played a Bösendorfer.

https://youtu.be/3EnosoXeTWI?si=fUl6McgguedjIsjd

Johnstaf Richter’s WTC is indeed great 👍🏻

Surprisingly, Richter recorded the WTC more than once. There's a non-churchy, non-reverberant recording by him of Book 1 out there somewhere, probably available on YT.

I am probably way way late to this conversation, but wanted to drop a note with a link (just in case it wasn't already mentioned before). This is one of the excellent Goldberg Variations I have heard (probably second only to 1981 Gould recording).

Another recent version of Goldberg that I have enjoyed is by Yunchan Lim at Carnegie Hall. Quite different than Gould or Koroliov but interesting in its own way. And an original idea for an Encore, I must say!

oshogg I initiated this discussion about Koroliov, and since then, I haven’t stopped listening to his records, including WTC, Goldberg, French Suites, and The Art of Fugue. He’s undoubtedly become my top choice for Bach. Thanks for the Goldberg link and for Yunchan Lim as well.

Has anyone listened to the "Open Goldberg Variations", recorded by Kimiko Ishizaka? To my knowledge she is the only top level weightlifter to ever record the set.

https://opengoldbergvariations.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimiko_Douglass-Ishizaka#/media/File:Kimiko_deadlift_at_the_2005_German_Championships_in_Powerlifting.jpg

QuasiUnaFantasia Open Goldberg is a really cool project and I like the recording quite a bit. I have a friend that went the other direction, he began as a professional musician and later in life became national champ in weightlifting.

johanibraaten he began as a professional musician and later in life became national champ in weightlifting.

I guess the way to go about it is starting early: as a little child with a toy piano you start every practice session by lifting your piano up over your head, and put it softly down again. Now repeat this every time you practice for the rest of your life, and you'll be the strongest person on Earth before hitting adulthood. 😉

QuasiUnaFantasia

I happen to like Kimiko’s Bach, too…..

I’ll probably listen to Yunchan’s Goldbergs at some point, but considering his bang-me-hard, romantic, overly-expressive background I’m not sure if I’ll like it.

Lang’s Goldbergs are simply too fast and superficial; it’s as if he’s trying to summon Glenn, but he completely misses the point: whilst Glenn could play them Goldbergs “fast,” he could also maintain a level of clarity that was just uncanny, and his timing/phrasing was also unique; as if Art Tatum suddenly became a Bach interpreter….IMHO!

This is one of the greatest performances I've ever heard of anything by anyone.

QuasiUnaFantasia I guess the way to go about it is starting early: as a little child with a toy piano you start every practice session by lifting your piano up over your head, and put it softly down again. Now repeat this every time you practice for the rest of your life, and you'll be the strongest person on Earth before hitting adulthood. 😉

Do we have an award for best post ever?

Btw, and along the same topic, I remember a YT channel by a Korean lady that was a competing weightlifter and an accomplished pianist, and the YT nick was "PianoLifter"…