Found a great Bach interpreter!

CyberGene · 2024-08-19T14:28:59+00:00

Some probably know from other discussions that I consider Bach the greatest composer of all time. If it wasn't for Bach, I wouldn't play the piano because that's how it all started: my mom plays the piano and she wanted me to start learning it too since I was 5 but I thought it was a stupid thing for years. It was only when I was maybe 13 or 14 when I once heard her playing some Bach on the piano and something struck me profoundly, so much that from that moment on, I devoted to Bach and, naturally, to learning the piano, so that I can play Bach. Expectedly, I was grown on Glenn Gould and would find him sufficient for listening to Bach, which is why for many years I didn't even seek other pianists. However, despite my love for Glenn Gould, I must admit somewhere inside me I also detest Gould. His playing is awkward at times, and that's an understatement 😀 I haven't listened to a lot of Bach lately, and you also know that I'm more into Scriabin and Romantic music at all, whereas my Bach devotion only lies dormant, waiting for those special moments when I am burned out and need to go back to the core of music. So, I've grown on what is the rather "robotic" Bach of Gould, but I'm more into Romantic music and I really started wondering why Bach himself would play without feel. It's absurd to expect such a great musician, who managed to condense so much emotion in his music, to be reserved in his playing. Especially on non-dynamic instruments such as the harpsichord and organ, he definitely must have used rubato and agogic accents in his playing. For instance, I love the F-minor prelude from Well-Tempered Clavier I and personally I feel it's a very dramatic piece that can benefit a lot from rubato and from dynamics that a modern piano can provide. My personal belief is that if Bach had had a piano (actually he tested some of the early pianos but that's another story), he would definitely use the dynamics for more expressivity. I recorded the F-minor prelude the way I feel it 3 years ago. I'm far from saying it's any good or worth it listening to, but at least it attempts to show how I feel this prelude should be played: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=puchMCtE14o I'm currently on vacation and have some free time for music exploration, so using the Apple Music Classical application on my iPhone, which makes it really easy to search and compare many interpretations of the same work, I listened to so many recordings, but none really matched what I sought, until I finally found an unknown (to me) pianist called Evgeni Koroliov. Yep, I'm also named Evgeni but I haven't heard that guy before 🤦🏻♂️ Wow! I'm in absolute awe of his entire WTC 1 and 2 recordings. The guy plays Bach exactly the way I like it! Seems he's mainly associated with Bach which says a lot. Apparently he's one who has dedicated a lot to understanding Bach, or that's what I want to believe anyway 😀 But I can wholeheratedly recommend his WTC, as well as Goldberg Variations and I'm yet to hear his other Bach recordings. Here's the F-minor prelude as played by Koroliov (just audio, the same as on the released CD-s): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hn6nYbHeGQ Besides, the audio quality is awesome and the piano sounds great to me. The WTC were recorded in 2000 and 2002. He's on the streaming services, you can find him if you like, here are links to WTC 1 and 2 on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/bg/album/the-koroliov-series-vol-5/1509333493 https://music.apple.com/bg/album/the-koroliov-series-vol-6-the-well-tempered-clavier-book-2/1512269442

jlg

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

jlg

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!

Argyris

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.

CyberGene

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.

Argyris

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.

QuasiUnaFantasia

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.

Johnstaf

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

CyberGene

Johnstaf Richter’s WTC is indeed great 👍🏻

jlg

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.

oshogg

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!

CyberGene

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.

QuasiUnaFantasia

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

johanibraaten

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.

QuasiUnaFantasia

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. 😉

Pete14

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!

Johnstaf

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

vagfilm

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"…

oshogg

Johnstaf Thanks for sharing!

Johnstaf

QuasiUnaFantasia 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. 😉

This is the same idea some people have about increasing the metronome tempo slightly every day to become a virtuoso. It leaves out the fact that a piece becomes incrementally more difficult every day if it's beyond the pianist's level of technical development.

johanibraaten

Johnstaf the greatest performances I've ever heard of anything by anyone.

That's the same feeling I got when I heard Sokolov performed Brahms concerto no.1 back in 1996. I still feel the same about that concert.

« Previous Page Next Page »