THE WELL-TEMPERED CLAVIER
Judith Lambden
Move Records MCD 667
Rather than loading up reviewers with the full 5-disc set of this exercise, Move Records have sent us the first disc only in the series, which takes in the first twelve preludes and fugues of Book 1 in Bach’s monument to adjustable temperament. I don’t know whether this is a case of economy (the rest of the CDs are available on request) or compassion; after all, it’s a substantial task to listen through the whole 48, even if such an effort is good for the soul and serves to pay due respect to the performer.
I’ve heard one previous all-Bach recording on Move from Judith Lambden. It dates from 2021 and comprised the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, the Italian Concerto and four of the seven keyboard toccatas: a welcome variety in content and form. But this Well-Tempered Clavier performance is a much more concentrated experience, even if the various pairs involved are – to some extent – common currency among pianists/harpsichords today.
Most of us have experienced these pieces in fragmentary form – as components in examination material or as instances of form in musicological investigations. Some musicians will have investigated the two volumes out of curiosity (possibly, a delighted form) at Bach’s endless facility for invention of the highest order. I’d suggest that quite a few keyboard players enjoy certain specific preludes and often their partner fugues more than others; in my lengthy exposure to them, I can count some favourite pairings on the fingers of one digitally semi-amputated hand.
But that’s as a player and substantiates the tedium of studying a piece under compulsion. In the realm of entertainment, the fugues have an emphatic cerebral attraction, primarily in seeing the work that the composer put into manipulating his initial material. Many of the preludes hold little interest, which may be due to over-familiarity, but that’s an unfair complaint and completely irrelevant to Lambden’s achievement which, we are informed by the Move publicity machine, is the fruit of nine years’ preparation and recording.
And it’s not the case that Bach’s compendia are solely useful for educational purposes. I’ve some memories, necessarily faint because they date back to October 2008, of the Canadian Bach specialist Angela Hewitt playing Book I in Melba Hall for Margaret Farren-Price’s Impresaria organization. Mind you, my main recollection is of the gleeful spitefulness from some audience members who detected a fault in one of the later fugues but, if that’s your level of insight after what was a dazzling demonstration of intellectual concentration, it would have been best to keep mouths shut. Sadly, they didn’t.
It’s not as though Lambden is lacking significant predecessors in recording the 48. Glenn Gould, Edwin Fischer, Wanda Landowska, Andras Schiff, Sviatoslav Richter, Rosalyn Tureck, Ton Koopman, Daniel Barenboim and Roger Woodward are only a handful of names in that long list of exponents who chose to put down their versions of these volumes for general delectation. I suppose that Lambden too feels that she has something individual to add to our experiences of this massive construct.
No surprises (are any possible?) with the C Major Prelude; Lambden avoids the ticking-clock approach for a more elastic mode with two points of slight rallentando and a realization of the piece’s climactic at bars 28-9. With the fugue, we are made aware of the subject entries in all four voices by the pianist’s practice of slowing the pace so that the first four notes are crystal clear. Still, while the performer takes care to point up some entries more than others, your sense of coherence is not challenged and it’s novel to hear a reading that pays as much attention to the tenor as to the soprano.
In the C minor Prelude, the toccata approach is muddied by some irregularities where Lambden doesn’t stick to the regular pattern but indulges in occasional blurring or note-clipping. As well, she has some sustained carry-over in the three single-strand bars 25 to 27 which are usually carried out with a love-’em-and-leave-’em touch; and the following Presto doesn’t live up to its name. In the following fugue, my only question is with some crotchets that aren’t sustained – hit well enough but left by the wayside, e.g. the alto crotchets in bars 10 and 11. But Lambden’s approach here, especially near the opening, is full of a welcome lightness that sometimes nears staccato.
I didn’t find the C sharp Major Prelude over-convincing because it came over as awkward with too many moments where fluidity of utterance disappeared, e.g. the left hand work from bar 47 to bar 53 and the subsequent recovery of tempo when the hands’ material is reversed. Again, this fluctuation in speed turned to an asset in the long fugue during which Lambden handled with warmth the middle section with its multiple double-sharps while pointing up some pivotal modulations with some slight pauses-for-emphasis.
No significant problems with the C sharp minor pair. Lambden made a feature of pausing slightly on the initial half-way point of the opening bars but started to distribute her emphases more equitably in the prelude’s second page, again finding a steady fluency in the soprano line whose dominance enjoys only one real challenge and that comes in the concluding five bars. I don’t think you can do much with the five-voice fugue except ensure that the simple subject gets prominence whenever it rears its head. Here again, the entries are handled with flexibility and only rarely do you sense the piece’s polyphonic weight (e.g., bars 99 to 100) as Lambden outlines the intermeshing strands with deliberation but little Romantic heft (apart from that tempting bass C sharp in bar 73).
Some clumsiness marred the delivery of the D Major Prelude with quite a few noticeably clipped notes in what is an evenness study for the right hand and which here started out as if to meet that requirement. As well, Bach’s concluding flurries for both hands – bars 29 to 32 – are treated as spasmodic bursts with interspersed pauses for regrouping, rather than the pell-mell rush that I think they represent as a lead in to the bar 33 cadenza-like flourish. I’ve not heard the fugue treated like this before where the subject’s semiquaver components are treated like demi-semiquavers, a practice that turns this already jumpy construct into a series of unexpected jerks. Does it work? Sort of, but you miss the magisterial progress counterbalancing the theme’s initial flourish/motif.
Lambden makes a better fist (or two) of the D minor Prelude, maintaining her tempo despite some uneven right-hand delivery points on the second page, then making the odd choice to sound the original’s sustained soprano D in the last bar’s first chord. Still, she does the same at the end of the fugue which progresses well enough apart from a pair of laboured alto/tenor trills. You are, by this stage, continuing to welcome the pianist’s intention to keep the polyphony clear but this lucidity can result in momentary digital strain as Lambden avoids employing one of the modern instrument’s greatest gifts: the sustaining pedal.
You encounter a deft example of this artist’s limpid approach in the E flat Major where both prelude and fugue enjoy room to breathe but with few indications that the performer is under stress, least of all in that long prelude with its sudden move to a kind of alla breve before taking up the initial motion fifteen bars later. No surprises of any moment crop up in the E flat minor Prelude – a sterling instance of Bach introducing us, through a slow-moving pavane in 3/2 time, to a key that we’ll encounter rarely on our various paths through Western musical practice. Then the D sharp minor fugue gives us a taste of the inversions, augmentations, cancrizans – the whole panoply – that eventually hit us centuries later with Webern. This makes a fair temperamental pairing in Lambden’s reading which is well-defined with a sense of exploring the strands that coalesce across this contrapuntal marvel.
A gentle amble through the E Major Prelude further exemplifies this artist’s undemonstrative mode of interpretation before an unexpectedly strict reading of the companion fugue which follows its inexorable path, leavened by some unexpected false relations. You get the mildest of emotional contrasts between the opening 22 bars of the E minor Prelude and that subsequent shift to a presto which, in this case, doesn’t send the blood racing. But you couldn’t ask for a more transparent texture than that offered in the fugue which sounds like a particularly spartan invention, accounted for here with a digital idiosyncrasy and dynamic balance.
A further instance of clumsiness comes with the F Major Prelude, another two-part invention which should sail past with even flutters but on this occasion is laboured, the trills in both hands clearly a trial to integrate into the piece’s movement, while the alternation of material between the lines is not deftly integrated. Fortunately, the kindly three-voice fugue that follows enjoys more fluent handling, even if much of the ornamentation distracts as it interferes – albeit slightly – with the work’s rhythmic consistency.
I’m sure there must be a reason why Lambden keeps on repeating the usually-sustained bass C across bars 17 to 21 of the F minor Prelude but that is a minor issue when you face yet again the problem of hard-fought ornamentation. By this stage you’re tempted to say that, if a mordent interferes with the music’s performative logic, leave it out; leave them all out! The second page of this piece proves to be much more enjoyable; in my Henle edition, there are no ornaments. It’s whipping a dead horse to note that the only real flaws in the F minor Fugue come when Lambden slows down to negotiate a trill, notably one introduced into bar 55 – just when the work was proceeding steadily.
You can’t doubt the performer’s sincerity in this exercise and the intense labour that has gone into the recording. But it makes for an often uncomfortable listening experience, chiefly because the disc shows effort of delivery on nearly half its tracks. In the end, for me, this Well-Tempered experience is unsettling and uneven.
O'Connell the Music 