Die Kunst der Fuge

I've enjoyed quite a few performances by the Netherlands Bach Society and just the other day they posted a really interesting one. We all know that the Art of Fugue by Bach was written for, uh, h…

Netherlands Bach

The Netherlands Bach Society seems to have an inexhaustible stable of fine musicians for their ongoing Bach project. Here is Christine Schornsheim with the Prelude and Fugue in C major from Book II o…

Reflections on the Bach Chaconne: variation technique

I haven't written about the Chaconne by Bach for a while, but I have been continuing to work on it, though I did miss over a month due to moving houses. Today I want to talk about what is probabl…

Reflections on the Chaconne: genre and style

So I guess the first question is, what is a chaconne ? As usual, the Wikipedia article is not a bad place to start: The chaconne has been understood by some nineteenth and early twentieth-century th…

Reflections on the Chaconne: performance practice

I put up the John Williams recording a while back. When it came out it seemed to me to be a really valid approach to the piece. It trimmed away the excess additions of the Segovia transcription and h…

Reflections on the Bach Chaconne

When I first discovered classical music back around 1970, it seemed like everything was for orchestra, piano, or violin. I was very happy to discover, after a while, that there was actually such a th…

What I'm Listening to Today

Back in 2018 Thomas Dunford released a CD of Bach on Baroque lute with the Suite in G minor, the Cello Suite No. 1 and the Chaconne from the D minor violin partita. Here is the Chaconne. For some rea…

Bach: Cello Suite No. 1 on Guitar

Many years ago when I was studying with José Tomás in Alicante, Spain, I brought in a new piece I wanted to play. I wasn't quite ready, technically, to launch into one of the lute suites so I had…