Tracing Bach
Yaara Tal released this album in August 2021, a collection of fugues played on the piano. The inspiration is Johann Sebastian Bach, but his own works are joined by other composers up to the present day. While Chopin or Schumann interspersed with fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier may seem jarring as a recital listen, Tal does a great job at paying no difference to the style she employs, no matter the age of the piece. The effect is to put each fugue on an equal plane.
The pieces not by Bach, which make up 50% of the twenty tracks were unknown pieces to me. Despite applying a common pianistic style across the album, the changes in harmonic language and in the case of the final track by the pianist’s friend Reinhard Febel, the use of flexible tempo, make it difficult to not notice departures from the Bach model.
However as that may be, I couldn’t help but look at the Bach pieces, each played with conviction and in a way to highlight their character given the capacity of a modern piano, as an inspiration for the others. We know Bach’s collection of 48 preludes and fugues made an impression on great pianists long after his death and were cherished by musicians; the evidence is their imitation of his style. In Chopin’s time, as an example, there wasn’t a cultural framework to produce such a piece outside the realm of instructional fodder. It’s instead an homage the past, I think, that inspired the creation of many of these pieces, as if Bach had invented the fugue. He hadn’t, of course, but he’d probably been the first to so neatly package them as something any composer worth their mettle could aspire toward.
Aton Arensky is a composer represented here, and serves as one of many exemplars of this nod to the past. The liner notes provide context:
That he was also rooted in tradition emerges not least from the fact that some of his works forge a distant link with early music and Bach. There is something almost programmatical about his decision to name his first published opus Six Pieces in Canon Form. The Fughetta in D minor that may be heard here was published in 1897 without an opus number. Its bro- ken chords strike a pseudo-Baroque note, whereas its tempestuous and impassioned tone is entirely in the spirit of Russian Romanticism.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s fugue was included in his own book on playing the piano, next to examples by Handel and Bach. Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia’s fugue can be traced to his influence by Bach’s son Carl Phillipp Emanuel Bach; his father, after all, had received the gift of Johann Sebastian’s Musical Offering. Painter Lyonel Feininger, inspired by his son’s own musical activities, took to writing a fugue and was familiar with the Well-tempered Clavier and Art of Fugue.
While HIP folk among us may not want to hear Bach played on the modern piano, I again have to say there is something special about hearing all these pieces brought to us on the same instrument under the same artistic direction by the performer. The variety of pieces gives us assured certainty that the writing of fugues is not just a mental exercise in counterpoint; the puzzles, as they really are, can be moving music when constructed out of quality themes.
I found this recital to be an interesting and refreshing experience. Hearing a variety of pieces by Bach against the pieces written in their form across several hundred years speaks to Bach’s eternal power over musicians. This album, I feel, is a celebration of this, done with care and polish.
