Tonight went to studio for a while to see how works were looking and to experiment with some combinations of panels in unusual situations for paintings, in corners, on floors.
Listening now to Andras Schiff playing the 2nd Partita in C minor from his new, live recording of the Six Partitas on ECM records. My favourite CD of this year.
As I have long I love how he creates a singing yet precise tone and love his rhythmic freedom and imaginative embellishment in all the repeats. I love the way he phrases, always in a singing way, articulated often into micro-phrases as in the fugal section of the 2nd Partita's opening movement. It is astonshing the intensity of affect he derives here from bare 2 part counterpoint that nevertheless evokes at least a 4 part texture of orchestral scale.
Schiff's playing has the effect of making all other pianists seem dry and, dare I say, academic and merely "correct". The variety of colour and attack he derives from the piano, coupled with the intensity of the recorded sound means this is like no other Bach recording I have ever encountered.
It sounds best played in open spaces, in a large room, then listened to from a slight distance. I have never experienced the sound of a piano in real space in quite this way before.
It is in its own understated way as radical a re-thinking of piano sound as the prepared piano of John Cage, the sound of early instruments or even the piano sound of Glenn Gould and Thelonious Monk. One reviewer has commented that the recording sounds as if one were seated next to him, the pianist, eerily silent as he is. In a space that allows its colours to resonate and resound in real space the effect is of a private concert, an unusually intimate effect of musical communication between composer, performer and listener. This recording has touched me like no other this year.
Let's come backto the Sinfonia of the 2 Partita. Without resorting to pedal at all Schiff sustains the andante's lines in a cantabile, singing right hand melody which builds in intensity leading to a short recitative- or toccata-like passage, full of diminished seventh chords leading inexorably to a fugue of blistering speed that evokes memories of the fugal finale of Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata op. 106. The way he performs the cadential trill on an E natural just before the end of the first movement immediately evokes the trills of the Beethoven finale.
This is one of many things I love about this recording: not only does it treat the Six Partitas as a totality, reordering them and performing them in the order 5 3 1 2 4 6, it re-inscribes them by way of later styles of keyboard music, as Schiff evokes, simply through phrasing, touch and rhythmic articulation the musics of Schumann, Chopin and late and middle-period Beethoven.
More to follow . . .
