Review: Daniel Barenboim playing WTC @ Carnegie

Daniel Barenboim performing at Carnegie Hall on Saturday.
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: January 23, 2007


The two books of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” contain an immense amount of music. Their 48 preludes and fugues touch not only on every major and minor key, twice, but also on just about every way an 18th-century musician might have conceived and executed either form.

The preludes range from comparatively simple, arpeggiated strolls through straightforward chord progressions, to grandly structured, ornate proclamations. And the fugues, each an elegant puzzle, tour the solutions composers used to make these exercises in mathematical perfection into expressive music.

Playing both books over a weekend and making each prelude and fugue leap off the page is a tall order. But Daniel Barenboim has never been thwarted by self-doubt, and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his Carnegie Hall debut — and perhaps to give a fresh push to his recent Erato recording of the complete work — Mr. Barenboim undertook a marathon, playing Book I on Saturday evening and Book II on Sunday afternoon.

A listener never knows what to expect from Mr. Barenboim’s piano recitals. He personalizes his performances to the point of perversity at times, but in a field so clogged with cookie-cutter players, there’s something to be said for that, not least because Mr. Barenboim is as likely to play with insight and beauty.

He touched both those extremes in these recitals. He was at his most rewarding either in fleet, light-textured readings (like his accounts of the Preludes in D and D minor from Book I and the Prelude and Fugue in C from Book II), or in forceful, crisp performances in which every line stood out clearly within the contrapuntal texture (as in the starkly chromatic Prelude in E flat from Book I and the Fugue in F from Book II).

Appealing as well were nuanced interpretations in which Mr. Barenboim imposed a scale of dynamics — sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden — that would have been impossible on the harpsichord. His reading of the C sharp minor Prelude from Book I, for example, was flexible and introspective, and the D major Prelude from Book II, with its fanfarelike figuration, took on a sense of high drama, with the slowly unfolding fugue offsetting it.

Often Mr. Barenboim’s fluid dynamics and tempos created an orchestration of sorts, as if moving the music from the harpsichord to the modern piano weren’t enough of a leap for him.

But engaging performances of this kind were sprinkled between solipsistic readings so quiet and introspective that you had to wonder whether Mr. Barenboim had forgotten that he was playing for an audience in a huge hall, or odd dissections (like the Prelude and Fugue in E flat, from Book I) in which emphases and tempo changes were exaggerated and labored. Other movements lacked even these peculiarities and were merely soporific.

In a program note Mr. Barenboim plays down the importance of the early-music movement’s research into how Baroque works were played in their day, saying that understanding what was done is less important than understanding why. Few period-instrument players would dispute that. Perhaps Mr. Barenboim should consider this: If you’re going to replace the performance style of a work’s own time with your own interpretive notions, will it be clear to your listeners that more is gained than lost? He accomplished this some of the time, but not consistently.

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