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Bach: The Well-tempered Clavier Book 1 – review

This article is more than 10 years old
Peter Hill
(Delphian, two CDs)

Peter Hill's account of the second book of Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues was one of last year's outstanding keyboard discs. Now he has completed his set with the first book, and what emerges so clearly again in Hill's wonderfully thoughtful, lucid performances is the sheer range of these pieces, the myriad ways in which Bach varied the preludes to incorporate so many distinctive 18th-century musical forms, from dances to studies, arias to improvisations. Hill characterises every one of them vividly and individually, just as he unfolds every fugue with musical authority and a clear sense of direction. The Prelude and Fugue in B minor, in the first book, encapsulates that approach – the full binary sonata form of the prelude is followed by a fugue whose subject uses all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, and Hill delineates it all perfectly.

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