The two-piano (and piano four-hands) duo of Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen has a gift for finding intriguing but obscure repertory, and they do it again here with composer Reinhard Febel's Studies on Bach's The Art of Fugue. Listeners briefly dipping into this may raise several objections, the most prominent being that Bach's The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, is arguably the most perfect piece of polyphony in existence and needs no adornment. For former music theory students, the music may bring to mind youthful attempts and ...
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The two-piano (and piano four-hands) duo of Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen has a gift for finding intriguing but obscure repertory, and they do it again here with composer Reinhard Febel's Studies on Bach's The Art of Fugue. Listeners briefly dipping into this may raise several objections, the most prominent being that Bach's The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, is arguably the most perfect piece of polyphony in existence and needs no adornment. For former music theory students, the music may bring to mind youthful attempts and failures to set chorale tunes with anything like the elegance Bach applied, but consider the work as a whole, and intriguing facets reveal themselves. Like Bach's original fugues, Febel's studies become more complex as they proceed, and he is careful to balance the intricacy of the new material (always in the second piano) against the original. He adds not only melodic elaboration but also deepening tonality (verging on atonality in one fugue), a new high register, and new rhythms,...
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