Customer Reviews

J.S. Bach: Die Kunst der Fuge

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Looking for the ideal version of the Art of the Fugue is like looking for the ideal version of heaven. There are too many variants, too many interpretations. Yet, over many years, this has been the version to which I have returned most frequently.

The sound of the harpsichord here is beautiful. The playing is sober without being pedantic, there is a fair dynamic range and the transcendental Contrapuncti 4, 8 and 11 come across the way they should. True, the more playful or virtuosic ones do appear more vividly in other versions. The problematic unfinished last fugue, a titanic achievement, is here offered both in its unfinished version and in a very competent and satisfying conclusion that brings back the original theme.

In his very mixed interpretation, Glenn Gould may offer an even more profound insight into the unfinished version of the last contrapunctus, but in truth this is the version to have - for sheer fugal bravura it would be hard to beat.

I bought this recording in the hope that, if I just gave Moroney another chance with this work (which he recorded so dryly twenty years ago), he would have improved in the meantime. Alas, he is just as dull, mechanical and workmanlike as ever, even if - at times - he seems to wish to break out of that straightjacket. But he seems to be a product of his time (the 1980s), a period dominated by a Gould/Leonhardt aesthetic that severely limited the extent to which the performer's point of view could be audible and that championed a mechanistic approach to all contrapuntal music. Moroney puts such faith in the idea that getting the order of the movements is the key to success in performing Art of Fugue that he seems distracted from revealing the beauty of the piece. Likewise, his "completion" of the fragementary quadruple fugue does not adhere to the requirements Bach set forth when he began this permutation fugue. I don't like "completions" in general, but one ought to, at the very least, attempt an execution that fulfills the objectives the composer set out after.