The German poet Goethe said, and is duly quoted in the booklet here, that a string quartet is "a spirited conversation among four reasonable people." That is not what Bach's Art of Fugue is, but string quartets seem impelled to keep performing the work, and audiences buy the move; the rarefied air of the string quartet seems to fit with Bach's contrapuntal mysteries somehow. This release by the Cuarteto Casals made classical best-seller charts in the late spring of 2023. It is one of the better string quartet attempts, both hewing to and departing from the work's Baroque character. First violinist Abel Tomás Realp mostly cultivates a glassy sound with little vibrato, as if his line were being played on an organ, but the other players allow themselves to be more expressive. The general approach is deliberate, and the members speak at length in the interview-style booklet about the necessity for deep contemplation in approaching the work. It is almost as if the group is seeking to clarify its contrapuntal intricacies. The music broadens out in the four canons, which are placed at the end right before the final fugue. That is given a little conclusion rather than being left hanging, as in Bach's unfinished manuscript, and it leads into the chorale Vor deinen Thron tret' ich, BWV 668, which Bach himself might have intended. The sound from Spain's Cardona monastery fits with the goals of the performance, which is to add a new layer of mystery to this perennially troublesome work.© James Manheim /TiVo

Fugue and the art of counterpoint are oftenalmost bywords for Bach the composer.Certainly, from the viewpoint of many latergenerations, he was the first composerto make fugue the basis for a whole andcomplete piece of music, one that oftenseemed to serve no purpose beyond the‘purely musical’. In a sense, this mustsurely be right: while there are countlessfugal compositions before Bach, very fewshare the same relentless, yet expressive,cohesion, and most that were written outsidethe keyboard sphere were associatedwith a text and liturgical function. There issomething about Bach’s fugal compositionthat immediately places it at the service ofcomposers such as Mozart, Beethoven,Brahms and Schoenberg. For them, earliercounterpoint in the Renaissance traditionprovided more a model for refined techniquethan for an overriding nexus of musicallycohering ideas.

Bach's The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080, was apparently his final work, breaking off unfinished in what would have been a monumental final section. It is written in open score, with no indication of instrumentation, which has given rise to various solutions: performances exist for organ, harpsichord, orchestra, small ensemble, and even piano, an instrument Bach is known to have encountered in his last years. But there is no recording like this one, which takes the open score as an invitation to realize the work with further creative effort, arrangement even. From the total ensemble of two violins, viola, cello, organ, and harpsichord, harpsichordist and director Ottavio Dantone and his always unconventional Accademia Bizantina deploy different combinations of instruments in the 20 fugues and canons that make up the work. Accademia Bizantina is a period-instrument group, but it can't be called a historical-performance ensemble. There's no indication that The Art of the Fugue was ever played this way (the intermittent combination of organ and harpsichord is particularly ahistorical), and Dantone offers an abstract, expressive justification for his forces rather than a historical one: he writes of an "art of hidden emotions." There is no question that playing the work this way diminishes its abstract, study-like quality (it has been argued that Bach intended it as a kind of compendium of technique, not as a work for performance) and increases its expressive qualities. Each fugue sounds different. Whether Dantone succeeds in maintaining the work's coherence will be up to the ears of the individual listener, but the procession of sounds is anything but dull: the rocking and rolling sounds of the Accademia Bizantina strings, with a trio sonata-like texture, make a compelling contrast with the keyboard settings of some of the more elaborate fugues, and Dantone's punchy harpsichord makes a further contrast with the more cerebral organ. This is a bold experiment with one of the intellectual landmarks of classical music, and there will be listeners who are not disposed toward something like that. But try it -- you might really like it.© TiVo

In April 2019, the brass ensemble phil Blech Wien for the first time joined forces with Olivier Latry (titular organist Notre Dame, Paris) to form a new, unique body of sound under the baton of Anton Mittermayr. The concept for this extraordinary listening experience was worked on for over a year: the declared aim was not the usual juxtaposition, but the merging of the two sound worlds, realized through trombonist Mark Gaal's arrangements. After the great success of the first performance in the sold-out Kulturpalast Dresden with the new Eule organ, the concert was repeated a week later on April 25, 2019 in the great Musikvereinssaal in Vienna. Olivier Latry on the Rieger organ with its 6,138 pipes and the 17 musicians create atmosphere, beauty, as well as powerful sound normally associated with large orchestras. © Deutsche Grammophon

After a first album devoted to early English music, Les inAttendus tackle Bach’s magnum opus: The Art of Fugue. And it is as poets of sound that they do so. Through the very particular colors and the “unexpected” combination of accordion, bass viol and baroque violin, they emphasize the masterly beauty and depth of this score. © harmonia mundi

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The Italian pianist Filippo Gorini took advantage of the world health crisis to immerse himself in The Art of Fugue, Johann Sebastian Bach’s unfinished mystical masterpiece: "The view that it should be seen solely as a theoretical marvel is misguided: as the counterpoints and canons evolve in formal complexity, so does their emotional tension, until the heartbreaking mystery of the unfinished Fuga XIV", says the young pianist, winner of a Borletti-Buitoni Trust prize in 2020, whose first two albums for Alpha have been very well received. In parallel with the release of this recording, Filippo Gorini will launch a website (www.TheArtOfFugueExplored.com), with a documentary series featuring conversations with personalities, films about Bach’s work and more. The young pianist has even gone so far as to write poems and haikus about the work: "We pray in trepidation, / When the blessed night is here...". © Alpha Classics

Bach's Art of Fugue came down to us without any clear indication of the performing forces desired. The fugue was primarily a keyboard genre, and this massive, almost mystically complex extraction of well over an hour's worth of contrapuntal treatments from a simple fugue subject is most often performed on a harpsichord or organ. But the work's abstract quality has invited performances on other instruments for decades. String quartet versions on recordings go back to a Roth Quartet version of the 1930s, in an arrangement to which Roy Harris contributed. But this is a risky way to go, riskier even than novelty arrangements for saxophones and the like that maintain and exploit a sharp contrast between music and medium. The string quartet was not part of Bach's compositional world, but its origins were temporally close enough to the Art of Fugue to make quartet performances sound just a little "off" from Bach's Baroque sound ideal. The liner notes of the Emerson Quartet's new recording of the work play up the cerebral aspect of the string quartet image; they seethe with diagrams and deep thoughts. But the cerebrations of a Classical string quartet are the witty dialogues of Diderot, not the solitary metaphysics of Leibnitz. The Emerson seems cognizant of the single-minded intensity of this unique work, but the group doesn't always negotiate the pitfall of sounding too much like a string quartet -- too elegantly expressive, too much like the conversation among learned friends to which the string quartet is so often likened. Bach's fugues aren't conversations, and though lovers of the Art of Fugue will find plenty to interest them here, those looking for their first Art of Fugue might investigate a keyboard version instead -- a work this concentrated is best appreciated without distraction. © TiVo

Helmut Walcha's 1956 recording of Johann Sebastian Bach's The Art of Fugue was the first stereo outing for Deutsche Grammophon, rightly regarded as one of the crowning achievements of the blind German organist who memorized Bach's entire catalog of organ works. Walcha performs on the 1725 Franz Casper Schnitger organ at the Laurenskerk in Altmaar, The Netherlands, one of the best preserved of all Baroque organs; its soundboards, keyboard, and most of the pipes are original to the 1720s. Deutsche Grammophon didn't have a way to issue this stereo recording in 1956, but had the foresight to utilize the technology anyway, as relatively few others did at that time; the stereo LP of The Art of Fugue finally made its bow in 1960. It has always been included in the various incarnations of the big Walcha box set of Bach's complete organ works available throughout the digital era. This separate issue in Archiv Produktion's Original Masters series, Helmut Walcha -- Bach: The Art of Fugue, is published to observe the centenary of Walcha's birthdate in 1907.There are numerous recordings of Bach's valedictory masterwork and nearly as many realizations of its "open" score ranging from the harpsichord that Bach likely intended to realizations for full orchestra. Nevertheless, for a long, long time critics generally considered Walcha's recording the gold standard for The Art of Fugue, and there are compelling reasons why this performance stands apart from the rest. Walcha favored the ordering of the 1927 Bärenreiter edition of the work prepared by Wolfgang Graeser; indeed, Walcha may have attended the first public performance of The Art of Fugue, given in Leipzig in Graeser's orchestral arrangement that same year. Graeser's was the first practical performing edition of the piece, and the concern about making Bach's jumbled score musically sound in practice appears here to override any other concerns. Walcha's use of registration renders all of Bach's sometimes knotty and frequently criss-crossing contrapuntal lines in this work completely clear. As Walcha plays from memory, the emotional content of the performance is natural, unforced, and of great depth. The sound of the Original Masters issue, though analog, is not dated and almost of digital quality in itself; clearly, this master tape has not been handled much, as it comes through clear as a bell, minus the tape hiss and gritty sonics that sometimes plague Deutsche Grammophon's 1950s recordings. This two-disc package is filled out with two trio sonatas, the C major Prelude and Fugue, BWV 547; the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue, BWV 564; and the famous D minor Toccata, all works recorded at the same 1956 sessions that produced The Art of Fugue.Some unscrupulous record labels have taken advantage of the long period in which this recording was unavailable as a separate performance in issuing Walcha's The Art of Fugue in a cheap, inferior package derived from an LP. Don't be fooled! Archiv Produktion's release is the real deal and should be the only one listeners pursue in order to experience this historically important, and in every way remarkable, recording.© TiVo