Here is the full text of my Monday Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of Sunday's recital by Pierre-Laurent Aimard at Chicago's Orchestra Hall.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard
Bach's Art of Fugue
Sometimes critics raise the questions while audiences just lean back -- or forward -- and enjoy the performance they’ve come to hear or see.
Why this repertoire? This performer? This order of works? This interpretation?
And sometimes, as was the case with French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard's recital Sunday afternoon at Orchestra Hall, it's the other way around. A critic has no questions, but the audience has many, and they are not necessarily unreasonable.
With the conjunction of the program in question and the performer presenting it, it could probably have been no other way.
Bach's Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, was left incomplete, or at least not fully transcribed, at its composer's death at 65 in 1750. For two centuries it was more of an academic and historical object than a repertoire staple, and even now there are debates about what Bach's intentions were. For what instrument or instruments was it meant? And was it even composed to be played at all?
These questions have rarely troubled me. The more Bach we can hear on the more types of instruments the better. And ever since Dame Myra Hess and Glenn Gould the debate over whether Bach can or should be played on the modern piano has interested me about as much as that over flouridated water.
The same with questions about whether a master of modern and contemporary repertoire such as Aimard should turn his attention to Bach, as he did at his Sunday recital consisting solely of the nearly 90-minute Art of Fugue.
Aimard's is a questing intelligence, or rather a questing set of multiple intelligences, and Bach is the source and the discoverer of so much that makes music interesting as well as what makes it beautiful that the pairing seems natural.
Treatise, menu, or template, Bach's attempt to explore the fugue -- a laying out of several lines derived from a single subject or melody -- in all of its forms in 20 "takes" is the ultimate meeting of a chess game and a work of art. Simple lines doubled back on themselves, not so simple lines intertwine three times over -- everything fascinates. Aimard's own first public take on the work is not concerned with "interpretation" rather it puts the work in front of us "straight" for our own additional contemplation.
For an hour and a half, as Douglas R. Hofstadter put it in his 1979 mindbender Gödel, Escher, Bach, Aimard spun for us Bach's "eternal golden braid."
Comments