Bach - French Suite no. 4 BWV 815

Hi!

Since I got interested in historically informed Baroque practices, I radically changed my way of playing Bach, so here is a new version of my previously uploaded French suite.

I have also made a video of this recording (same audio):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uwgdH9zKKw&feature=plcp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ1Xl42LD_8&feature=plcp

These two weeks I'm quite excited because I'm having classes with Judy Tarling, and within 15 days I'll play to her Bach Chaconne in D minor transcribed by Brahms (yet, she's an early music expert, but she's quite open minded! she said it would be interesting. =D)

 

Dawn!

I can't upload MP3 from work. :|
I'll upload the MP3s when I get home, much later...

 

Here they are.

 

This will make interesting comparison with Joe's version! Did you meant in this way or is that just one of those unbelieveable coincidences, that both of you were in the dark of the night preparing the same suite?

I have heard so far the Allemande and the Courrente, so will offer comments later, if you do not mind.

 

its just a coincidence. the only suites I play are this one and Partita no. 6. I tried to record this one a month ago, but my piano was out of tune.
and itll take months for me to re-record the partita, since Ive been very busy in college tryingo to do lots of things I dont even have time to. =p

 

Felipe,

I listened to the Allemande, the Courante, and the Gigue.

Normally I would consider it in poor taste to comment on someone's performance who had just submitted the same piece as me, but are you sure you wanted to submit this like this?

Don't get me wrong; I very much enjoy listening to interpretations that are wildly different from my own, and rubato can be applied in Bach in many different interpretive ways. But this strays into the territory of the undeniably incorrect. In the Allemande, for example, you're pausing in almost every measure as if the downbeat isn't a quarter note but a dotted half. I know that as you say, there are historically informed practices, but surely these couldn't be advocating rhythms that are wrong? Not to mention that there are many passages that don't sound worked out and are very noticeably uneven. In the Gigue, you don't play the notes in many of the trills, and there are some strange pauses again. Those lefthand sixteenths at the conclusion sound noticeably smushed together. The Courante is the best, but even there there are pauses that completely alter the rhythm and wild tempo changes abound. I don't think Bach is any different than any other music in that it requires at least some degree of adherence to the rules of music before an interpreter can exercise individual freedom.

Sorry to be blunt (as I generally am). Just my limited opinion of course. It just puzzles me because you clearly have fingers and I've heard you play very well before.

Joe

 

hi, Joe!
I enjoyed your comment because it was this same suprising effect that stroke me when I heard a harpsichordist playing Rameau at 12. It impressed me in a very bad way. And until 1 year ago, I would never enjoy it.

it's also funny because in your commentary you practically detailed every Baroque practice I have applied here, including UNEVENNESS (in French, inégalité).
=D

I dont expect everyone to enjoy this, even so because this may sound as weird practice for pianists (as it sounded to me until last year). Its just a try to include the Baroque musicianship on modern piano playing, mixing the old with the "new" (piano), since mathematical performance is really not Baroque practice.

It was this same reaction (in the beginning, it sounded disgusting) that made me got interested in studying it. And I got amazed that almost everything I had learned about Bach and Baroque performance was wrong. Its so revolting that great pianists (who are our "models") refuse to study it! =\

 

I need to be blunt here too.... IMO you've gone way over the top with playing "HIP rubato" here. No two notes are of equal length, making for a nauseous listening experience. At least in the Allemande, which I really could not finish listening. Some of the other items fare a bit better, in particular the Gigue which is not as distorted rhythmically as the other items.
Technically there is nothing wrong here, but to me these interpretations seem a bit perverse, and I hesitate to put them up. Perhaps this approach would work to some extent on a harpsichord, but not on piano. I sorely miss Bach's rhythmic drive and vitality here. Just my personal opinion of course !

 

I join Joe and Chris in bluntness. Believe it or not, it makes no difference if you play Bach on a piano, a harphsichord, a cello, a harp, a guitar, with a string quartet, a brass choir or an orchestra. Rhythm is rhythm, meter is meter, tempo is tempo and rubato is rubato. The same interpretation is possible (within mechanical capability) with all of them. I'm afraid you have gone over to the dark side and have become intoxicated with your notions. You will have a VERY small set of appreciating auditors given the extremes you are practicing - It is just too odd for folks with predictable heartbeats and rhythm-of-gait to appreciate. Your new-styled performances would not be acceptable for admission to any serious music school. In the course of music history, each of the elements of music have gone through a process of change, extension, and increasing complexity. Melodies have changed their character; rhythm and meter became more complex, displaced and fragmented. Harmonies went from the very simple to the complex, to the cluster, to the indeterminate. Compositions have gone from those defined and created by the composer, to the extremely mathematical, to the null set of abandoned art with stochastic, chance and ambient-noise "music." But through it all, temporal proportions have remained true to their referent. As I argued elsewhere, the practice of notes inégales practiced sometimes in the French Baroque, never gives permision to distort the very fabric of time with pliable/oscillating meter or to re-write [melodic] rhythms as you desire. You are putting mustaches and goatees on great musical works of art a la Duchamps' Readymades. Perhaps you should take up chess even as he did. I think it would be helpful for you to approach music more as a composer, and think of others taking the liberties with your compositions. If you were like Bach, detailed in the defining of the meter, every pitch and every rhythm, you might be outraged at the distortion produced ... or might feel that the performer had a poor internal clock. Hopefully, this is just some phase that you will work through (the Prodigal Son in "a far country") and in the end your pendulum will be more properly aligned. Having said all this, I will add that I found your Gigue very acceptable - but then it offers you the least potential for modification.

 

The article you point out is actually not as straightforward as the quotation above seems to imply.

I am not taking sides here, but I do note four things:

I have noticed over time that recordings of Bach on the harpsichord and on the piano sound very different and I note this recording is closer in style, to my ears at least, to one played of a harpsichord. It might be interesting to pick the recordings of, say Gustav Leonhardt, and listening to them critically. I might prove wrong and the difference is due to ornamentation or some other factor.

I am not aware that Bach ever used words such as "precision", "unchanging tempo", "squareness" or the like. He always emphasises "a singing style". This is the lesson behind the Inventions and Sinfonias.

Bach never even bothered, most times, to give any tempo indications, leading to many theores that tempo was implied, following a convention now forgotten, in the time signature and notation, but that is only a theory. There are examples of it in action on YouTube.

I have listened to Bach performances from the 1940s onwards. Would we nowadays accept the b minor mass played by a large orchestra with a choir of 300 voices that sounds more like Bruckner? Would we accept the 1970s Bach, which was supposed to be played as written: no ornaments, no dynamics, no expression, because such was Bach's intention, or else he would have written it. What would the 1940s public make of the 1970s performers? Which of them would be right? What do we say about them? What will people say about Joe's and Luis' versions in 50 years time and again, who will be right?

 

I sense a learned and lofty discussion in the making

It's impossible to know what Bach 'wanted', or what is right or wrong. But it seems fair, at least to me, to assume he would NOT have wanted his music to be pushed and pulled this way, so that almost every bar is being distorted rhythmically. Even if some harpsichordists feel they must play it this way.
In the end, the important question is whether this is nice to listen to, rather than if is according to what someone wrote in a book. To my uninformed
ears it is not. Other may feel different of course.

Sorry Luis :cry: I'd recommend everybody to play Bach - especially a die-hard Romantic like you - but not like this.

 

Let us just hope it will not end up with a free for all with each of us calling the other names!

Luis posted one of the sinfonias some weeks ago, which Monica enjoyed a lot (viewtopic.php?f=20&t=5391), which just shows you how this matter might really escalate till it rivals the Querelle des Bouffons.

Even if we look at pianists in general, there will be those you worship znd the man (or woman, for that matter) next door abhors. Look at Martha Argerich and Arau and Pogorelich. I have heard very strong opinions about their musicality or lack and here we are on less controvertial ground!

 

Good point. I understand why on a harpsichord you need to lean a little on a note to make it stand out. Although there's no need for that on a piano,
it gives a nice authentic feeling if you do it a little bit, in addition to using dynamics. But both devices should be used discreetly and sparingly IMO, or else
it will become a caricature. The playing here reminded me of our former member Sandro Bisotti whose playing tended to be very eccentric (albeit for
different reasons).

 

What does this acronym HIP refer to? I'm not familiar with it. I guess I'd still be curious about the more specific logical justfication for why anyone would feel free to change rhythms that are printed on the page a certain way. Surely Bach would have written them differently if he wanted them played that way. I don't think it should matter whether it's played on a harpsichord or piano; music is music, as Eddy alluded to above. This is not to say that individual performances can't be wildly different from one another. But in the end, I think it's this dichotomy between understanding the rules and conventions and interpreting them that makes an individual performance successful and interesting. In other words, I like to hear the rules stretched to their limits, but not wildly changed and distorted so that the original is unrecognizable. I don't even have a problem with occasionally altering rhythms (e.g., double dotting) when it makes logical sense. I just don't see that anything in this performance has the least logical justification behind it at all.

I wonder whatever happened to his piano circus :wink:

 

Eddy, I really don't see the point of your comment here.
I have already read it somewhere else... What's the point of copying previously written comments?

I quite sure of that!
I'll soon criticize my own performance here below, but at first this is my first claim: pianists know beans about Bach and mainly Baroque practice. This Robert Hill's performance on piano would not be accepted also (and THIS IS ROBERT HILL!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR0Ljdm21l4

 

Very good point, Richard! This is exactly what motivated me to investigate this kind of performance. It's so strange to our common practice of nowadays that it should have a point, and I wanted to know which point it is.

Yes. It's reinforced in CPE Bach's treatise. That's one of the reason that Glenn Gould's Bach are really weird to the baroque language (no problem: Gould never said his performance was authoritative from a historical point of view).

That's theory, some of them with good points. For example, there are treatises that say the tempo must follow the pulse beat. There is also proportional timing (this one CPE Bach says something like this: you must see the fastest passages of the piece and play them in a clear and comfortable way. This is the tempo for the whole piece).

But this is something that I treat in a more relaxed way, since the piano is more flexible about it (harpsichordist can't play too slow because it can sustain the notes, for example).

 

Your personal and passionate judgings are contradictory. If it's impossible to know what Bach really intended, so we really can't say anything about is acceptable or not: if it's really impossible to know it, or everything is acceptable, or nothing is (considering mainly that Bach didn't write this pieces for piano...)

Sure. But this is more cultural than it seems at first. We'll like what we are used to listen to. Before starting studying Baroque more, I'd appreciate Gould, Tureck and Schiff a lot. Now I don't even have patience for it. I've bought a lot of new CDs played by Pieter Belder.

 

Good point: I started studying historically informed performances (including in Romantic repertoire - there is a book entirely of how to play Brahms! =D) in order to get rid of this kind of "argument". Something like: "but Argerich plays this faster... but Arrau plays this with more pedal"... this goes nowhere. It sounds like a fight like this: "I like yello. No! Blue is A LOT MUCH BETTER!"
:lol: