Bach, J S: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2 (extracts)

Wilhelm Kempff's credentials as an organist and composer lend a naturalness and flexibility to these performances of some of Bach's best known Preludes and Fugues. There is also the very forward-looking, almost improvisatory piece of programme music - the Capriccio and a wonderful performance of the great D major Toccata and Fugue.

So much has been written about the sensation caused by Gould’s first studio recording of the Goldberg Variations in June 1955 that it is hardly necessary to repeat the story of this “birth of a legend” here. But even though it was this recording that laid the foundations for Gould’s international reputation as a Bach interpreter, its roots lie much further back. From the very outset his Bach had been as unconventional as it was distinctive – and so it remains, in spite of regular attempts to enthrone a “new Glenn Gould”. (Conversely, this has meant that every new recording of Bach’s keyboard works is judged by Gould’s standards.) His habit of slouching over the piano, the expansive gestures of his hands and arms, his stabbing nonlegato (almost always without the use of the sustaining pedal), his breathtaking polyphony and his often extreme tempi all result in a kind of pianism that seems to come from another planet, reminding us of Stefan George’s poem in Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, “Entrückung” (Rapt Otherworldliness): “I breathe air from another planet.” [...]

DVD: The Goldberg Variations (1981) directed by Bruno Monsaingeon

Picture format: 4:3

NTSC; colour; DVD-5

Language: English (with subtitles in French and German)

This is a brand new and exclusive set of 14 CDs which covers the work of Sviatoslav Richter from 1954 until 1993. “I don’t know if it is possible to explain to anybody the extraordinary phenomenon his personality and playing created. We can only hope that this can also be sensed through the recordings, for Richter is one of the few performers whose individuality is clearly manifest on a recording, regardless of its quality, and at each subsequent listening his playing gives a greater, more staggering experience than we are able to remember” (Dezsó Ránki, CD booklet).