On the title page of “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Bach’s monumental keyboard collection of preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys, the composer wrote that he intended it “for the profit ...

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 ...

The harpsichordist describes Bach’s Preludes and Fugues as a ‘challenge and a homecoming’. His thoughtful new recording has a sense of the work’s drama but is never wilful nor perverse Harpsichordist ...

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 ...

I've just ended a year of playing Bach, and it was a no-nonsense deal. Like going hunting with your father-in-law. Every day started with a shouting match in my head. Stop! Intruder! Call the keyboard ...

The latest volume in Mahan Esfahani’s voyage through Bach’s harpsichord music arrives at one of the key works of the whole keyboard repertoire. In a typically thoughtful (and in places typically ...

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 ...

On the other hand, the Book 2 C major Fugue’s gradual winding down in the final bars seems deliberate and purposeful, while Woodward varies his articulation of Book 1’s C sharp minor Prelude’s ...