Bwv 992

There are few more sublime manifestations of the numinous in the mundane than Bach chorale prelude transcriptions sensitively played on the piano. Unfortunately, such things are now virtually forbidden by the authentic instrument law that does not permit Bach to be played on the piano, no matter how sensitively. In the past 20 years, there have been only two recordings of Bach chorale preludes: Murray Perahia's oh-so-sensitive performance and Paul Jacobs' just-the-facts performance. One has to reach further back than that to get good Bach.

The "Facsimile" series contains recordings of musical works written in the 16th — early 19th centuries in their original sound. It concerns both the choice of instruments (old ones or their replicas), editing and performing devices of the epoch.

An example of this is the present recording of Bach by A.Lubimov , which was made at the M.I.Glinka Museum of Musical Culture (the USSR) performed on a "Tschudi" two-manual harpsichord (London, 1766). The Instrument was restored by V.Golosov in 1984.

Following his magnificent recording of J.S. Bach's Inventions and Sinfonias for BIS last year, the Japanese harpsichordist/organist/conductor Masaaki Suzuki here offers more revelatory performances of some of Bach's equally well known (as well as some lesser known) masterpieces. With this collection, simply titled Fantasias & Fugues, Suzuki provides a grand overview of Bach's lifelong sporadic exploration of the Fantasia genre.

German pianist Holger Groschopp has emerged as something of a specialist in the voluminous body of transcriptions by Ferruccio Busoni. The most famous of these are treatments of Bach's music, but he also wrote arrangements and reworkings of Mozart, Liszt, and many other composers. This is a new recording of Bach transcriptions, made in 2011. Busoni's transcriptions are often heard singly on recital albums, but there's a lot to be said for hearing them in large groups, even for hearing the two CDs' worth here. It gets into the range of treatments Busoni applied, from massive Mahlerian attempts to encompass the world of the organ on piano, to studies in chromatic harmony, to quiet reverential treatments.

Bach had written all the music on this disc by his early thirties, and it’s immediately striking for its spontaneity and expansiveness compared with the terse craftsmanship of his later years. Kenneth Gilbert is a thoroughly persuasive advocate, binding together the sectional toccatas and sustaining momentum through the long, potentially rambling, fugues. A high spot is the C minor Toccata with a final fugue so long that its pulse becomes hypnotic: you simply never want it to end.