In an intriguing program, pianist Jenny Lin selected five Preludes and Fugues this afternoon from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 and surrounded each with a pair of Preludes and Fugues from Shostakovich's Opus 87. The story is fairly well-known: Shostakovich heard Tatiana Nikolayeva play all 48 of the Bach Preludes and Fugues (Books 1 and 2) in 1950, and suitably inspired or challenged, wrote his own set of 24, one in each major and minor key. So interleaving the Bach and Shostakovich in a performance has a certain appeal. Will we hear more than a superficial connection? A lot has to do with the particular choices in each Shostakovich-Bach-Shostakovich trio, and Lin's choices worked quite well, with neighboring pieces in nearby keys, sometimes nearer than you might think. The Bach E minor Fugue, for example, ends on an E major chord, so going directly into the E major prelude of Shostakovich was easy on the ear.
So was Ms. Lin's playing. She came out on stage looking cool, calm, and collected, making eye contact with the audience (unlike some players), and sitting comfortably at the keyboard, all of which puts the audience at ease. It would be inaccurate to call her playing "relaxed"; "completely confident" would be better, and considering that this was her debut recital in the Bay Area, that was a good sign. I especially enjoyed the clarity with which she brought out inner lines, even in the thick of 4- and 5-voice textures.
The transitions were sometimes illuminating, but not always. Exiting the Shostakovich C major fugue, which contains only white notes and therefore keeps a certain simplicity, and entering the Bach C major prelude, with its white-note arpeggios (for 5 bars, anyway) seemed not to be a 200-year jump at all. On the other hand, following that with the Shostakovich A minor prelude, played at breakneck speed, seemed jarring, despite the harmonic connection. (A similarly troppo presto tempo seemed to derail the Bach E Minor fugue for a few bars.)
One naturally thinks of the influence of Bach on the Shostakovich pieces, but the performer must also consider the effect of Shostakovich on the Bach. For example, the Bach pieces are often played with varying nontrivial amounts of ornamentation, mordents and trills and grace notes and so on, whereas the Shostakovich is not, so if you're juxtaposing them to bring out their similarities, you would likely play the Bach fairly straight. Lin did that, except in the C# minor prelude, where the ornaments seemed overdone, even though they would be mild for most Bach performances.
(Actually, the older I get, the less ornamented I like my Bach. An ornament draw attention to a note, and some performers get so carried away that the ornaments cease being the icing on the cake and become the cake itself. That wouldn't be an issue for, say, Couperin. I heard a brilliant concert earlier this month by Juho Pohjonen, who played pieces from Couperin's Fourth Book for Harpsichord, followed by Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, where the point was to highlight the difference between the original and the homage, and moreover, where the icing really is the cake.)
The Bach C# minor fugue is a grand, stately affair, one of my favorites, and stylistically, it is closer to the Shostakovich D minor double fugue than to the A Flat major or D Flat major preludes that surrounded it. Similarly, the Bach D major fugue, with its flight of quick 32nd notes followed by slow, dotted eighths, is closest to the Shostakovich B Flat minor fugue, with similar figures. That may be the strangest piece in the entire Shostakovich Opus 87: one might call it "dreamy," following no discernible rhythm. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a fugue, Western civilization's most structured art form, as such a free-flowing piece. In this enlightening performance, it suddenly occurred to me that this fugue sounds like bird calls: they're all the same melody, but they're completely asynchronous and tonally unrelated. It's not every piano recital of Bach or Shostakovich that reminds you of Messiaen.
2 comments:
I enjoyed your take on the B-flat minor fugue. I downloaded my recordings from a Web site set up by the pianist Denis Plutalov, so I decided to check track durations. (Each track is a prelude-fugue coupling.) D minor was (as the program notes indicated) the longest; but second place goes to B-flat minor!
I do have one point of disagreement, though. As a result of the time I have put into Alfred Mann's The Study of Fugue, I have come to agree with this author that fugue is not a form, at least not in the way that rondo or any ternary form is. Mann's argument is that the nature of fugue lies in imitative processes within the constraints of tonality, rather than in any structural architecture. (As I recall, he even suggested that Bach's final work should have been called The Art of Fuguing. Note, also, that a similar argument may be applied to the term "prelude.")
Thus, what impressed me in Lin's program was how much diversity both Bach and Shostakovitch brought to this "process-based" approach to both prelude and fugue and the ways in which Lin's execution informed us of both the differences and the similarities.
I just remembered something else on the topic of form: Did you notice that the B-flat minor prelude is basically a passacaglia?
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