The preludes and fugues that make up Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” operate on multiple levels at once — they’re a compilation of techniques for keyboard writing, a polemic on the subject of tuning ...

Keith Jarrett and Johann Sebastian Bach go back a long way. Between 1722 and 1742, Bach composed two sets of preludes and fugues in all twenty-four major and minor keys, written for keyboard; the ...

Christophe Rousset, a remarkable harpsichordist and conductor who occupies a place of high honor among Baroque-music interpreters, scores a triumph with this magisterial reading of one of the ...

I don’t think that Sviatoslav Richter, still less Sir András Schiff, would have reminded me of Kurt Cobain at this point. Not even, maybe, Edwin Fischer, whose pioneering 1930s recordings set a ...

Accessibility of knowledge was crucial to the Enlightenment. That ethos was embodied in the celebrated Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, the first of its seventeen volumes appearing in 1751, the ...

Boyd Tonkin tried to answer that question this time last year, when Schiff gave his first late-night Bach marathon at the Proms, and I can only echo his amazement when it comes to the second ...

Piotr Anderszewski has recorded Book II of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, sort of. I’ll explain in a moment. Anderszewski is the Polish pianist born in 1969: brilliant, versatile, and individualistic.