POO: Johann Sebastian Bach

xp yes, i immediately chunked both parts into one big 'album'

Bachfest reminder:

https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/#

Why is the "prelude" always actually the best part?

Man, the harmonic movement in this one, no matter how much Bach I hear I keep finding things that surprise me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYfpq_q_egQ

you could probably have convinced me that was an early 20C piece if I didn't know

I don't think I can OPO Bach recording, but if we're just talking keyboard music I'd have to go for Ralph Kirkpatrick's 1967 recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier Book II on clavichord. There's a mystical, shimmering quality to the clavichord on it, and Kirkpatrick's performances are deeply thoughtful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZNnpNzmQZE

The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080. I really like the Emerson Quartet's recording.

The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988. The Gould recordings from 1955 and 1981 are a study in contrasts.

What’s the worst Bach, I wonder? speaking compositionally

There are moments in Musical Offering that are so fragmented that I’m totally fine without them, but that might be cheating

Well-Tempered: the C-major fugue always bugged me, esp after the perfect Prelude, it felt like JS was trying to pack as many statements of the subject in as humanly possible and it becomes leaden and uninteresting

Violin/cello: not a lot of shit in these volumes, it’s pretty spectacular throughout, but the C-major violin fugue is really long and wears out its welcome, and most of the E-flat cello suite is irritating both to play and to listen to; the 2nd Bourrée is cute as a button tho

Never liked the B-A-C-H fugue, personally, but it is so interestingly dissonant for the time that it’s impossible to call it a dud

Oh and my POO Bach is absolutely the second movement of the Double Violin Concerto. I grew up on Zukerman/Midori but enjoy most the NBS performance on YouTube maybe

Bach I don't much like? Concerto in the Italian Style. I can't exactly point to anything wrong with it, it's just so damned F Major. It sounds a little too self-satisfied for me, like a lot of Mozart.

Vivaldi Autumn drives me crazy for the same reason tbh (not the lovely middle movement, the aggressively F-major first and thirds)

Yes, exactly that.

I know very little about the actual history behind various Bach pieces but I always wondered if he just didn't like "the Italian style" very much and was sneering at it a bit when he wrote it.