Bach Reflections

Album review

German pianist David Theodor Schmidt has chosen a fairly rare pairing: a brave juxtaposition if ever there was one. After the Sixth Partita for clavier – note that the six partitas are the only major suites written in the Leipzig period – which he performs here in a resolutely pianistic reading (on the very sound basis that it is pointless to mime the harpsichord on the piano, all the less when these works are written for "clavier", i.e. harpsichord or organ or clavichord or fortepiano, all instruments available at the time), and he offers one of the more complex passages of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the passage in B-flat Minor from the Second Book – showing that the rarer the tonality, the more Bach explores unknown territory. After a jump of more than two hundred years, we find ourselves with Shostakovich, and the last of his own Preludes and Fugues, in D Minor (the composer used a different order to Bach), a dark piece, very far from the sarcastic Shostakovich we sometimes seen; here, it's lyricism and counterpoint that take centre-stage. Finally, Schmidt closes his album with a real rarity from Liszt, the Variations on "Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen". Liszt takes a step away from his habitual virtuoso fireworks displays, preferring to develop a language borrowed from the Cantor, with its chromatisms, its rigorous counterpoint, and while he sometimes moves away from lyrical flights, he does so the better to return to a quasi-religious meditation. © SM/Qobuz