Bach: The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080 (Emerson Quartet)

A luxuriant and expressive recording that demonstrates how the string quartet is an ideal performance medium for The Art of Fugue (even though it was probably written with a keyboard in mind). It’s not just that a string quartet can sustain lines in a way that can’t be done on piano or harpsichord – it’s that you’re afforded such great transparency of texture and much greater space to characterize and colour individual lines. This recording is probably the best example of what a modern string quartet can do with The Art of Fugue – by turns austere and virtuosic, reserved and brilliant. There is a good deal of vibrato, but textures are always lucid and often illuminating. For instance, in C.7 the way the entries are highlighted lets you follow the upward drift of the augmented subject, in C.9 the powerful entry of the second subject sets up the surprising landing on F major, the Canon at the 10th has a dancelike quality generated by judicious staccato, and the legato phrasing of the Canon at the 12th gives it a sinuous, curving feel. There are also some well-judged dramatic moments, as in the pauses at the end of C.1 and the late-Beethoven intensity of the end of C.11.

A note on two pieces included here that aren’t often heard in The Art of Fugue. The first is an early (and probably discarded) version of the Canon with following voice inverted and augmented (36:31). It’s an extraordinary and profound work (in fact, probably my favourite of all the canons), and I have no idea why it’s not included more often in complete performances of the set. The second is the Chorale “Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit” (“Before the Throne I stand”), based on an earlier chorale prelude Bach wrote. This work was tacked on to the end of That Art of Fugue to compensate for the unfinished C.14, but I think its inclusion here is fully defensible. For a start, its occupies the same stylistic space as The Art of Fugue: it is intricately worked out in Bach’s late contrapuntal style, with all sorts of fugal devices in abundance (you hear inversions and stretti right from the beginning). It also works pretty well to establish a sense of closure: it's serene, even worshipful, and the entrance of the chorale tune as a cantus firmus is especially poignant. And last, though this is not a strictly musical consideration: this was in fact the Bach’s last composition, dictated from his deathbed. The Art of Fugue was abandoned at least 6 months before Bach’s death and was begun way earlier around 1741/2, when the WTC II was finished and the Goldbergs were written (the handwriting on C.14’s manuscript – dating from much later – is also too neat for it to have been produced by a blind Bach, and the rest of the page was not properly ruled, indicating that Bach didn’t intend to continue the work – on that page, at least), so the notion that C.14 is Bach’s final work and its incompleteness a monument to Bach’s death is pretty inaccurate. The Chorale, however, is exactly that, written with full knowledge of impending death, and concluding Bach’s last fugal masterwork with it seems pretty apt.

A final note re instrumentation: some of the low parts played by viola and 2nd violin are taken by the viola and tenor viola respectively. The quartet also reverses its seating when playing the inversus of the mirror fugues, so that the inversion extends to the spatial acoustic.

00:00 – Contrapunctus 1
03:03 – Contrapunctus 2
05:47 – Contrapunctus 3
08:18 – Contrapunctus 4
11:48 – Contrapunctus 5
14:20 – Contrapunctus 6
18:31 – Contrapunctus 7
21:38 – Contrapunctus 8
26:31 – Contrapunctus 9
28:45 – Contrapunctus 10
31:48 – Contrapunctus 11
36:31 – Perpetual canon with following voice a fourth below, in contrary motion and augmentation (Early version of the canon with following voice inverted and augmented)
41:49 – Contrapunctus 12, rectus [inversus at 43:39]
45:32 – Canon at the octave
49:35 – Canon at the tenth
53:16 – Canon at the twelfth
57:29 – Contrapunctus 13, inversus [rectus at 59:35]
1:01:44 – Canon with following voice inverted and augmented
1:08:36 – Contrapunctus 14
1:16:44 – Chorale: “Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit” (“Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein”) BWV 668a

Видео Bach: The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080 (Emerson Quartet) канала Ashish Xiangyi Kumar