Bach – Well-Tempered Clavier Book II
Luc Beauséjour
Naxos 8.570564-65
In the CDs of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier some performers use a modern piano, while other performances are on instruments that Bach was familiar with: the clavichord, the organ and (most often) the harpsichord. I am not about to launch into a diatribe on the unsuitability of the modern piano. It is true that I have never liked Glenn Gould’s Bach (sacrilege!) but I have listened with pleasure to Rosalyn Tureck, to Keith Jarrett and especially, to Angela Hewitt.
Beauséjour is a French-Canadian musician, who studied in Montreal with Mireille and Bernard Lagacé and subsequently in Europe with Ton Koopman and Kenneth Gilbert. He won First Prize in the 1985 Erwin Bodky International Harpsichord Competition in Boston. He has recorded a substantial number of works by Bach, including Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier (also on Naxos).
For the sake of comparison I have been listening to two other performances on the harpsichord: those by Masaaki Suzuki (on BIS) and those by Christophe Rousset (on Harmonia Mundi). I felt that Beauséjour was holding his own, although of the three I liked the Rousset best since he found a poetic quality that was not always there in the other two. I have to add though, that when I want to listen to these Preludes and Fugues, it is the Angela Hewitt recording (on Hyperion) that I shall play most often. That goes to show that, for me at any rate, a stupendous technique, clarity of voicing, a wonderful sense of phrasing, a subtle sense of rubato and a thorough grasp of baroque performance practice matter more than whether these pieces are played on the “correct” instrument.
