This A minor Prelude from Bach's first Book ladies and gentlemen - here (rapid-share or send-space) given in a classically crazed interpretation - sounds like just a wild little improvisatory thing he dashed off betweenwhiles.

"The occasional homo-phonic chords may be slightly broken" writes Tovey; well Glen with one "n" does that all the time so let us hear what he too makes of this piece.


In the first three bars it sounds as though he holds down the A in the bass for longer than Bach suggested he should; but there is no great harm in that. Far worse is the way he plays bars seventeen and nineteen - the bass should be marked and emphatic, "drummed" even, despite Tovey's timid warning, and certainly not rushed over as in Glen's performance. Even so it is as a whole not unpleasant, although as it turns out the only broken chord we hear comes at the very end.

The difference is in the style and content of the music is not it? In the case of yesterday's Fugue Bach wrote the subject in such a way that its curious intervals would when in combination with itself and/or other elements generate with every new quaver a new and astonishing verticality. It must go at a tempo that enables the auditor to relish at leisure every quaver. Whereas to-day's Prelude has as we stated an improvisatory quality that is quite different; in the first three and a half bars we hear (as we might in some popular song) only three harmonies and they are very common ones. The interest of the work lies more in the if we may say so slightly sinister melodic gestures . . . Candle-lit Bach was not exactly living in our present civilized age was he?

No not at all not that either. To-day's Prelude is a fine work, but simply of a style and character different from that of yesterday's fugue. We do not see the necessity of playing at the same tempo two works with the time signature 9/8, any more than of playing at the same tempo two works with the time signature C.

The only Preludes we find a little weak are those in which the composer changes tack half-way through, as in the case of the Presto section of number ten (in Book I), or the Allegro of number three in Book II. Possibly Bach gave them to one of his sons or pupils to "finish off" because he had something rather important to do elsewhere . . .

The sound of those viols is indeed very pleasant, especially in that it is leisurely - they take some time to ease into each note and do not have the sudden attack of almost all modern instruments.

Players of all kinds of instruments have attempted the Art of Fugue - probably this is simply because no particular ensemble was specified by the composer - whereas this has not nearly so often been the case in the case of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

To-day's A minor Fugue from Book I is we think quite early Bach; nevertheless it is one of the most enjoyable works in the entire collection. Here it is in another eminently eccentric rendition (rapid-share / send-space).

We rejoice in the thick harmonies of bars twenty-four to twenty-seven, and we love the way the work is driven by its rhythm; that driving rhythm and the diatonic framework both so predictable permit the most outlandish and unpredictable combinations to shew forth as inevitable, that was Bach's secret! And we especially adore the flying escape from cadence at bar sixty-two!

All these elaborate combinations are possible because in the first bar and a half every degree of the minor scale is already sounded; all Bach really has to do thereafter is to combine them in a myriad of ways.

Another point which may be mentioned is that the whole work is of a character such as instantly to appeal to common people of all races untutored in "classical music" as a genre. After a single audition of this Fugue any moderately musical youth as we know for a fact will at once drop his "pops" "film music" or "jazz" and henceforth return always and ever to Bach for his pleasure. Music of this kind - music of the "fast Bach" - the keyboard and violin concerti, the Brandenburgs - is enjoyed by every one without exception!

To whom shall we listen as comparison? Perhaps we should give Friedrich another chance.


As well as promoting "anti-bourgeois music" whatever that may mean he was of course also a "jazz" addict and normally that is a very bad sign indeed yet it may mean that he could handle rapidly interweaving contrapuntal lines. After all if he fails we can always laugh at his mistakes: Friedrich's attempt.

Well! what we can say is that his playing is unnecessarily staccato (quite contrary to Tovey's recommendation of a "general legato") his expression excessively jaunty and the pianoforte tone most peculiar - it puts us in mind of Mr. Baziron's spoons does not it! His tempo is not too bad but the whole does not approach that for which we might have been justified in hoping. Can any Members recommend a more exciting interpretation?


The sixteen-year-old Friedrich looking very bourgeois indeed.

As they say just a little to the East from here: Vater werden ist nicht schwer, Vater sein dagegen sehr. I don't know if just the fathering should be counted as a cross in itself...

To-day we turn to Book II and an idiot interpretation of its pleasantly pastoral A major Prelude (rapid-share and send-space).

Tovey was tremendously struck by the bass in bar twenty, which consists simply of two As in succession. "Perhaps no single note has ever combined more threads of the musical history of three centuries than the second bass-note of bar 20 with its gesture of behaving like a merely homo-phonic bass contented to devote itself to marking key-notes," he writes. It is with evident relief that he continues, "With bar 21, however, the bass revives and again leads to the sub-dominant."

Here as comparison is how András - another quiet one - does it.

Not with those trousers you shouldn't, Syd.  Honestly, I thought you would have learned from your Shostakovich experience. 

Tommo