For perfection and consistency of rhythm, and exactitude in the performance of all written note lengths, Mr Grew has provided the perfect model to satisfy all Baroque connoisseurs. We should all do well to emulate it in its mechanical precision, and I shall be contacting Gustav tonight to appraise him of the situation.

CLICK

Baz

True - but Frescobaldi (1615) peeped into view there. He was, however, speaking of his Toccatas. Since these are mostly slow, quasi-improvisatory pieces he was really speaking about the need to interpret the notation with a certain freedom (including the drawing out of cadences). As such this is really only tangential to the annoying matter of applying habitual rallentandi at the ends of movements.

Baz

Well she was certainly flying on all cylinders there was she not? In showing how versatile a double-manual knitting machine can be, she managed (to our ears) to drop only a single stitch. This was at the end of bar 5 where her move down to the lower manual did not quite coincide with the movement of the bobbin (we noticed an extra semiquaver creep into the process). But as a musical seamstress she again showed the art of invisible mending, and the piece thereafter zoomed its way through without losing any further stitches.

The funny thing was that to our ears her performance commenced by sounding as though she was playing upon a full organ (rather than a knitting machine), but our fears were soon dispelled by the arrival of bar 2.

Baz

Whereas, in the words of Sir Donald, "the shakes should have swollen out like the messa di voca of the best bel canto" should they have not?

Rosalyn's performance provides a useful example of irregular but effective shakes does it not? They sound like an almost random but pleasant enough mixture of triplets and quintuplets.

To-day we come to the Fugue in G minor from Book I of Bach's key-board exercises for advanced students (rapid-share / send-space). It is a long and serious work; as Tovey for instance points out its counter-subject is derived from its subject by simply inverting the two figures thereof and reversing their order. Wanda in her Commentary makes two interesting points. The first is that "like all musical thoughts in minor keys which begin on an upbeat, it expresses torment and grief." This connects with the subject of our thread about Mozart's Fortieth does it not, but we are not at all convinced that she is right.

Her second remark is this: "Full justice is due to the last two measures [i.e. 'bars'] in which Bach gives the soprano a melody of supreme beauty." The reason or explanation of this is clear to us: it is because of the half-diminished seventh on the first beat of the final bar. In all the most beautiful melodies of composers from Purcell to Rachmanninoff this combination of notes is present and makes the crucial contribution. And in this case the wonderful verticalities are not confined to that half-diminished seventh but include also the seventh quaver of the second-last bar: A-D-G-C, a modernistical combination worthy of Schönberg himself in 1908.

Wanda further points out that the theme of this Fugue may also be found in Cantata 106, "die allerbeste Zeit."

Now here as comparison is Samuel's interpretation, but actually it is in-comparable. It is not merely expressive; it is very very expressive, expressive in the extreme. That is one of the marks of genius is it not, to take things to extremes. We believe he had the right approach or attitude here; once one decides to begin being expressive that is one should not satisfy oneself with half measure but should be as expressive as one can possibly be. And listen to the outcome!

Speaking of the G Minor Prelude (book 1)...


...it is true that it does, and we enjoyed her performance here more than we often do.

But we strongly feel that most performers take this movement too slowly (perhaps wallowing selfishly in the feeling of "minor mode", and sensing the written-out slides to be expressive of some Je ne sais quoi entity that - in truth - nobody knows!). If the movement is played at a proper speed (and by "proper" we mean only a slow speed that is still fast enough however for a feeling of 4-beats-per-bar to be sensed) the trills do not stand out so aggressively in isolation from the rest of the texture.

With regard to these trills (and taking them within the above framework), we had in mind something along the following lines (which we have impishly created purely for clarification and the entertainment [insofar as it might entertain them] of members)...

CLICK

Baz

As we carried our laptop into the garden with a cup of coffee, we awaited the daily breakfast to be served up dutifully by Mr Grew. When it arrived we were delighted to see that feeding time today consisted of Bach's G Major prelude (book 2). So we were half expecting that this simple little morceau would be accompanied by the following prescriptions from Sir Donald Tovey:


So our delight will be evident that Mr Grew spared us, upon such a glorious brillig morning, the slithiness of The Tove as it gyres and gimbles its polemic irrelevances.

Regarding Gustav's lack of repeat for the second half, we have noticed that it is always his custom to adopt this method throughout the whole of Bach's '48 preludes (when repeats are indicated that is). But we feel that while for some movements this is acceptable (and we have in mind such works as the D Major prelude from Book 2, where the second half - being about twice the length of the first - provides a perfect balance with a repeated first half when played only once) for others it is not. This movement is a case in point, presenting as it does two halves of almost identical length. To repeat merely the first half (only) does we feel result in an unbalanced rendition. In these cases (as here) we feel strongly that the initial return from dominant tonality back to tonic (as the first repeat makes its effect) actually requires a counter-balancing effect of a return from the tonic to the dominant in the second half. Gustav here does not do this, and we feel that the first section is accorded an unnecessary double weighting overall. This is strange we feel because all the first section actually does is move (according to normal procedure) from the tonic to the dominant, while most of the tonal interest lies in the second half (where more related keys are explored). We positively yearn therefore to hear it a second time and feel disappointed that Gustav confiscates from us this experience purely out of (shall we say) "procedural consistency".

We also deem Gustav's tempo to be unnecessarily staid in this performance. Why did he not give it (if we may descend into the vernacular) some "oomph" as he shows in (inter alia) the A Minor Prelude from Book 1. While we are mostly in complete empathy with the attitudes and styles Gustav presents to us, we retain also the right to be critical when we feel him to have fallen short of our expectations!

Baz

...And the remarkable thing about Wanda is that she managed the need to oil her knitting machine only once - grinding to a halt gracefully at bar 62 to prepare the equipment (in tip-top condition) for those impending demisemiquavers! This ensured a smooth and unblemished conclusion, embodying a mixture of cross-stitches and pearls.

But what of Samuel?! We have to say that he foxed us! We listened most carefully to his RH in bar 55 in order to examine what was wrong with it (note-wise that is). And we have to admit that even though we had for long prided ourself about the quality and sensitivity of our natural audio facilities, we were damned if we could discover which of the six semiquavers was the wrong note! We suspected that the note played on beat 3 was spurious, but his performance is so ridiculously fast that we were not sure. SO...we tried a little experiment to find out...

...by slowing down his performance by 50% (and let us not worry about the resulting poor sound quality, but instead be thankful for small mercies) we were able conclusively to prove that the rogue note was indeed where we had supposed, and that he plays an A instead of a G...

Listen for yourselves! starting at bar 45

While we are unaware of the sources The Slithy Tove has in mind, we do ourself possess what is thought to be (at least one of) the earliest - the London BL autograph, and this appears to us to be notated in completely the normal manner. (It is difficult for us to think of any other way of notating a 3-voice fugue, and even more difficult for us to believe that it was ever effected with 4-part chords.) We do, of course, have nothing against "homo-phonic" writing provided we are prepared (as we are) to remain "politically correct" about it! It should be remembered that Art so often acts as a leader to politics, and that when Tovey freely spoke about things "homo-phonic" this was very many years before it became politically incorrect any longer to be "homo-phobic".

With regard to Mr Grew's interesting idea that this fugue should begin more slowly and accelerate as it proceeds, we feel that this idea should not be so lightly dismissed! There are it seems good grounds for believing that this practice existed as a means of discharging Baroque movements that otherwise were of minimal intrinsic musical interest.

Indeed it is now some 2 years since we came into the possession of an interesting example from the works of Handel (this being kindly sent to us by another distinguished member of this MB - and we hope he will not mind our sharing the experience with others?). This piece was, purportedly, performed in this version by a little-known (but evidently highly competent) specialist group based in Cheshire, known as the Knutsford Chamber-Pot Ensemble. Their only apparent shortcoming is the trill at the final cadence which seems to us to begin on the main note rather than the upper (although we are still examining this forensically in order to be certain). But this is real food for thought is not it?

CLICK

Baz