RECOMMENDED
Glenn Gould aside, few pianists have been able to make Bach work on the piano, an instrument that did not exist in Bach’s day (Bach is said to have heard an early and crude prototype of the “fortepiano” very late in his life but was not impressed) which has meant that Bach keyboard works have remained primarily the domain of musicologists and early music specialists on the one hand or impetuous pianists who either play Bach on the piano as if the piano were a harpsichord, i.e., no pedal or color and as square and sterile as a cuckoo clock, or they over-Romanticize and over-pedal into a blurry mush. Following in the Peter Serkin tradition, who came to Bach from contemporary music, French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard is coming to Bach from the same vantage point but with more different and far more interesting results, as his new recording of Bach’s final work, his monumental yet unfinished “Art of the Fugue” (Deutsche Grammaphon) abundantly demonstrates. Every piece is a surprise, some remarkably slow, some lacking in pianistic color, others with an abundance of it. But one thing is for sure: this rare opportunity to hear a master pianist and more importantly, a master musician, traverse his way through this entire Bach opus in an afternoon will not be boring. (Dennis Polkow)
Sunday, April 20 at Symphony Center
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