Bach (The) Art of Fugue
Agile Aimard, shunning the heavy-going path, takes us to the heart of fugue
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Johann Sebastian Bach
Genre:
Instrumental
Label: Deutsche Grammophon
Magazine Review Date: 3/2008
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 79
Mastering:
Stereo
DDD
Catalogue Number: 477 7345
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
(Die) Kunst der Fuge, '(The) Art of Fugue' |
Johann Sebastian Bach, Composer
Johann Sebastian Bach, Composer Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piano |
Author: Peter Quantrill
This is not to imply dryness or inflexibility on Aimard’s part. He follows Tovey in finding No 3 to be “one of Bach’s most beautiful pieces of quiet chromatic slow music”, after which the extraordinary cadences of No 4 (actually the final completed movement) are necessarily pedalled and clipped, even chirpy: the envoi of a true Kapellmeister. The great unfinished fugue is especially fascinating, gradually accumulating kinesis until the surge of B-A-C-H pulls us towards its unattained apotheosis with the force of the Severn Bore. Applied with more plain-spoken authority, such emphatic strength of wrist and will rather chews up the Tenth’s preludial bars and the expansive, chorale-fantasia conclusion of the Fifth, though with equal force one senses that, in this case, they had to be so. Perhaps no pianist since Charles Rosen has so persuasively demonstrated that this contrapuntal encyclopedia is to be heard as well as read.
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