When we say Bach was a family man, what do we mean? Albums such as the ‘Alt-Bachisches Archiv’ from Cantus Cölln (Harmonia Mundi, 5/03) previously underlined how seriously JS took his responsibility as the inheritor and curator of a lineage and a library that would reach its high noon in summatory projects such as the B minor Mass and The Art of Fugue. More recently, however, ‘Bach-Privat’ (a concept developed by Andreas Staier for Georg Nigl and friends – Alpha) wove together elements of the composer’s personal and professional life as if to round out a portrait of the complex figure illuminated (in English, anyway) by the scholarship of Christoph Wolff and the late Peter Williams.

Now comes Daniil Trifonov, brush in hand. The album’s first half works like a putative third volume of the notebooks presented to and then compiled by Anna Magdalena, showing how the most talented of her sons and stepsons were chips off the old block. As befits any Bachian compilation of substance from the Orgelbüchlein onwards, there is an element of ‘progressive’ instruction, beginning in terms of technical demands with the old Petzold Minuet in G, worked under the fingers of student pianists almost since its inclusion in the second Anna Magdalena notebook. How few of them, however, can have phrased it with Trifonov’s enviable simplicity and grace – and fewer still dispatched the cascades of a JC Bach Presto with equal fluency.

The bridge to the main business of the album is achieved through the agency of Brahms, and his left-hand arrangement of the D minor Chaconne probably composed as a tombeau for Maria Barbara Bach, in a performance of Arrau-like weight and steady accumulation of tension. At this point a warning of spoilers is in order, because the plot of the album takes the first of several dramatic twists with Trifonov’s liberated, graceful and agile movement through the first four Contrapuncti of The Art of Fugue. He approaches them as though Bach’s lifelong self-training in counterpoint had served not to press a weight of retrospection on his shoulders but rather to release all the accumulated wisdom of technical refinement. This is The Art of Fugue as a Winter’s Tale, a divine comedy or a seventh-dan master practising his katas in an act of physical meditation.

So sprightly an articulation of the French-style dotted rhythms in the second Contrapunctus is hardly uncommon these days, it’s true, but unlike most of his rivals on record Trifonov avoids the associated trap of blowing through the movement with a trivial facility of gesture. More remarkably, he keeps the tempo up as the fugues gather countersubjects and retrograde elaborations. The triple fugue of Contrapunctus 11 is almost shrugged off to begin with, its initial statements as precise and refined as a tea ceremony or the opening gambits of a Platonic dialogue, before the fusion of pace and intricacy gathers fearsome pianistic momentum. The chromatic knots of No 8 are likewise sliced open with a rapier rather than a broadsword.

The outlier here is Contrapunctus 5, which Trifonov imbues with the weight of Bach’s organ-writing at its most gothic. He has grouped the canons after the mirror fugues and before the unfinished ‘fugue on three subjects’, which begins in sober fashion before springing another surprise: the pianist’s own completion, which works the three subjects together without (so it seems to me) returning to the cycle’s main subject. Much like the album as a whole, it’s both audacious and humble at the same time, closing with a slow dissolve that acknowledges the impossibility of ‘completing’ Bach while clearing the fog of sentimentality from its fragmentary state and claiming the music for the modern piano.

So does the Italian pianist Filippo Gorini, while coming at the cycle with a more traditional attitude of reverence. An associated website promises to host a film of the piece from the Mole Antonelliana in Turin, as well as discussions on Bach between Gorini and ‘some of the greatest personalities of today’, among them Alfred Brendel, Frank Gehry, Peter Sellars and Marcus du Sautoy. In lieu of booklet notes, Alpha has printed 14 sonnets by Gorini owing a heavy acknowledged debt to Eliot and the Four Quartets.

Perhaps it’s best to stick to the playing, which is wonderfully luminous, and complemented by studio engineering closer than for Trifonov but never claustrophobic. Gorini caresses the chromatic arches of the ‘Canon per augmentationem’; there is a tactile, pleading quality to his Contrapunctus 5, and even his quick movements (the Italianate Ninth, for example) are beautifully regulated by a meeting of fingers with brain comparable to (for example) Zimerman’s Chopin. Only the precious solemnity of his left-unfinished final fugue dissuades me from placing Gorini on the top table of my own Art of Fugue pianists, where Trifonov now joins Charles Rosen (Sony, 3/69).