DESCRIPTION:
My favourite fugues from Book 1 of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. While the preludes are very beautiful, they pale in musical significance beside the frankly absurd contrapuntal and harmonic genius on display in the fugues, so none of them here, I’m afraid.

Not many are familiar with Korevaar, but I like his approach to Bach (as much as I like Gould and Hewitt, say). His approach leans towards the romantic – he lets himself meander, gets lost in the counterpoint, lingers on dramatic moments, uses subtle pedalling, and pulls on phrasing with hints of rubato and tiny pauses on important notes – the sort of little repeated brakes that might stop your car ploughing downhill. I think there’s something quite touching and luminous to his playing, just as there is something stark and austerely beautiful to more baroque, “get-on-with-it” styles of play.

00:00 No.1 – The highest concentration of stretti in any fugue I know of.
02:15 No.2 – One subject, two countersubjects, triple counterpoint, canons, stunning (Handel-esque) sequences. A fugue lover’s fugue.
03:40 No.4 – A particularly dramatic fugue of incredible sophistication, with 3 subjects that work perfectly with each other, often played simultaneously in stretti.
08:14 No.12 – A theme whose harmonic diversity (that leap from B (natural) to E (natural)!) is emphasised by its lack of rhythmic variation. The subject and answer contain all 12 semitones (cf No.24). The fugue is built around the complex at mm.7-9, where the subject is played simultaneously with both countersubjects. The complex recurs at mm.19, 27, 37, 44, and 53. In the main body of the fugue the subject is heard alone only once, at m.40.
12:46 No.13 – This remarkable thing is really a fugue (subject + countersubject) and a three-part invention with a gorgeous theme (the pattern with the repeated semiquavers beginning at m.7) rolled into one.
14:44 No.16 – A very elegantly constructed thing, where the countersubject is derived from an inversion of the subject, and where motivic cells are constantly repeated in double counterpoint.
17:20 No.17 – A simple fugue whose main attraction, for me at least, is its beautiful theme. (It also contains one of my favourite moments in all fuguedom, the deceptive cadence at 19:46 with the move to the naked submediant after the dominant).
20:09 No.20 – A show-off fugue, insofar as any of the fugues are designed to impress – a heady smorgasbord of fugal/contrapuntal techniques. Interestingly, the inverted subject is nearly as prominent as the subject in this fugue, and canons at the 5th of both the subject and its inversion appear with increasing frequency towards the end (see 23:57, 24:07, 24:42, 24:55, and so on). Canons at the octave are scattered everywhere: 23:15, 24:27, and so on).
25:35 No.24 – A unique (and complex) fugue in many respects. Its theme contains all the notes of the chromatic scale (a thematically clever way to end Book I, if you think about it, since Bach promises in his preface to write “durch alle Tone und Semitonia” – through all tones and semitones ). Every other note in m.2 spells Bach’s name, and the subject (because of its chromatic nature) can in fact be seen as two interleaved BACHs. This fugue also contains a number of religious motifs often seen in sacred music. It is also one of two fugues in Book I with a tempo indication, although it should be noted that in Bach’s time Largo did not indicate an absolute tempo but rather a tone or pattern of feeling, which in turn informed as to tempo.