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26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
BE FAIR TO BACH, 13 Jan 2004
Probably the first thing that needs saying here is that the anonymous performers are none other than the Emerson Quartet. The second thing that needs saying is that while the performance and recording are absolutely top-notch in my estimation, there are two things about this production that I quite strongly dislike. The first is that the big final fugue, believed to have been left unfinished by the dying composer, breaks off abruptly. To me, this is a completely pointless procedure. Either provide a conclusion or leave the piece unplayed altogether. Providing a conclusion here is not like trying to provide a missing last page to a symphony by Shostakovich or even by Haydn, where there would be no way of knowing what final surprises the composer might have in store. If Bach’s Art of Fugue is anything, it is some kind of ultimate in method and logical development. Bach’s own conclusion can’t be determined with complete certainty, but it can be predicted better than in most other works, and if one thing is absolutely certain it’s that Bach did not intend a sudden silence. There is a conclusion by Donald Francis Tovey, there is another used by Davitt Moroney in his eminent harpsichord rendering, and I expect there are numerous others. For anyone who cannot bear to listen to a single note not guaranteed as by Bach, an extra track could be created at the point where his manuscript leaves off, and the rest of us could ignore it and let the music play through to some coherent ending. My other problem is with a liner-note that I find utterly insufferable. Most music-lovers probably want some commentary and guidance in this abstruse and didactic score. What we are offered here is a text that tries to do incompatible things and does them both very badly. Churchill once remarked, on seeing the name Bossom in the list of his new members of parliament ‘That name is neither one thing nor the other’. This liner note is neither one thing nor the other. On the one hand it parades a pretentious ragbag of bogus, irrelevant and distracting pseudo-complexities, and on the other it attempts a talking-down-to colloquial style that I personally find intolerable. Not every music lover is likely to want as much detail as is contained in Tovey’s great Companion to the work, but there is an excellent, instructive and readable short commentary by him in the chamber music volume of his Essays in Musical Analysis.The Emersons give the first 11 numbers in the usual sequence, then one of two versions of the canon by augmentation in contrary motion, then the first pair of mirror fugues, then the other 3 canons, then the second pair of mirror fugues, then the alternative version of the canon by augmentation, followed by the unfinished fugue and the chorale ‘Vor deinen Thron’ by way of conclusion. The style thoughout is severe and serious. The dynamic level is more or less unvarying except for some understandable build-up at the climactic #11 and, more questionably, just before the final lacuna of #14. There is little or nothing by way of ‘expressive’ phrasing, and for that relief much thanks say I. Expressiveness in any ordinary sense is as out of place here as it would be in Newton’s Pricipia Mathematica. Some fugues are as ‘expressive’ as any other kind of music, not only in the Italian tradition of improvised fugues that underlies the fugues of Handel, but sometimes even in the fully worked-out and academic German style of which this composition is the ultimate exemplar. Here I am firmly of the school that believes that any such interpretation is grotesquely out of place. The normal quartet instruments are supplemented where necessary by a tenor viola to provide some low notes below the usual instrument’s reach, the players’ seating is reversed in the mirror fugues, and the quartet members offer some of their own special thoughts on the meaning of the work to them.
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~ Various Artists
~ Emerson String Quartet
~ Glenn Gould
~ Pierre-Laurent Aimard
~ Ludwig van Beethoven
