The text for this release announces that this is “BACH FOR
THE 21st CENTURY - Roger Woodward presents the most exciting
Bach since Glenn Gould”, and indeed, this CD has already been
awarded the Deutsche Schallplatten Kritiks prize, which means
it may well appear in your shop with one of those reassuring
gold stickers. Woodward has played Bach all his life, though
this is his first Bach recording. He surprised some by including
Bach in his concert performance of Debussy and Chopin at the
Radio Bremen concert hall in January 2007, but for me the biggest
surprise was to discover how wide a range he has beyond the
contemporary work by which I had previously recognised his name.
One of my earliest CD purchases was a copy of the 1990 Etcetera
double disc Woodward made, that of Morton Feldman’s Triadic
Memories. He is also known for his championing of the music
of Xenakis and others, and his discography is a remarkable document
in its own right. Part of the package sent to me by Angela Boyd
indeed contained modern piano music by Hans Otte and Peter Michael
Hamel, but also included the Chopin Complete Nocturnes
which will be put through their paces elsewhere on these pages.
Angela Boyd’s own interview
with Roger Woodward provides a number of interesting perspectives
on what he thinks about life, music and the world in general,
and has certainly helped gain a more rounded picture of the
performer as a person.
Woodward sees Bach as a romantic composer, or at the very least
an unproblematic partner to Debussy and Chopin in a single concert
programme. Certainly, such a mix isn’t so very incredible within
any recital, but in playing Bach from a perspective which allows
for colourings and gesture which we associate with later composers
Woodward goes against the tide of authentic performance practice,
and pianism which lends from this school of interpretation.
I’m not going to argue for or against either way here, and would
only add that, by playing Bach on a piano, any musician is already
on a losing wicket if intending to position themselves within
the early music scene. My only concern would be in the results.
To possibly mis-quote from some forgotten source: ‘play Bach
like Brahms, and you are a dead man’, which would seem to suggest
that we are all bound to play Bach like Bach. Anyone who plays
Bach knows that the great man’s music can stand a great deal
of monkeying around with before it starts turning into Brahms,
and performers have been able to make Bach sound like Bach even
while sounding like Glenn Gould or Sviatoslav Richter at the
same time.
Some of my favourite Bach recordings of all time have been amongst
the most romantic, so I approached this disc without trepidation.
Before waxing too lyrical too soon however, I usually find it
worth orientating myself with some earlier discoveries, and
even though there is no overlap in repertoire I find the manner
of playing Michael
Studer exhibits in Bach pretty exemplary. It is direct and
unpretentious, light in touch, and with a singing lyricism which
is pretty irresistible in my opinion. Roger Woodward’s sound
in this excellent recording is actually quite crisp, and his
playing always conveys the utmost clarity. I have listened carefully
to this CD several times, and find myself still on the fence
about a few issues. Looking first at the Partita No.2,
the playing frequently attacks the strings with no lack of weight,
and in this way is comparable with Martha Argerich’s 1980 Deutsche
Grammophon Bach disc. Her timings are also comparable in this
piece, with only Woodward’s more ruminative Sarabande putting
him about a minute longer, and a less tumultuous final Capriccio
seeing Argerich cross the winning post about 45 seconds
in the lead.
So much of one’s response to a recording like this will be a
question of taste, so I’ll pin my colours to the mast first
with one thing I’m less keen on. When playing fast, Woodward’s
trills are so swift that it sound as if his fingers were vibrating
even before hitting the keyboard, and doing that with something
of a splash. This doesn’t feel musical to my ears, and while
I can imagine these readings weren’t built for comfort, neither
do I want them jabbing me like a hammer drill. This is something
of the point of these recordings. You might imagine ‘romantic’
Bach to be the kind you could enjoy of an evening with your
best fluffy slippers and the memory of a pre-ban pipe or cigar,
but Roger Woodward’s performances are anything but the kind
for relaxation. There is a high combustion intensity in the
opening Sinfonia of Partita No.2, from which we
are delivered with relaxed urbanity in the second section. The
third section is swift and punchy, not really with the lightness
and bounce of some, but with plenty of drive and an unstoppable
sense of direction.
Roger Woodward plays his Bach as a composer as well as a pianist,
and the sense of relationship and context between movements
is as strong as that within the movements themselves. There
is also a sense of structure to the programme which I’ll come
back to later, but I have to express my admiration for the sense
of improvisatory exploration which comes through in a movement
such as the Sarabandes of both Partitas. It is something
to have that fresh feeling of spontaneity in a live performance,
but another altogether where a musician can cleave a lifetime
of preparation to a sense by which the music almost seems to
be invented on the spot. I also particularly enjoy Woodward’s
treatment of the thinner two-part textures of the Tempo di
gavotta in BWV 830 which is full of fun, and the
Corrente, which, despite its swift movement, has a lyricism
mixed with a walking jazz feel to the left hand and some eccentric
flourishes like the one at 1:01 which sounds like it has a wrong
note, but which is repeated later on at 2:05, so it must be
right. In short, I like these Partita recordings. Roger
Woodward has remained true to himself, and these are individual
and at times individualistic performances which won’t float
everyone’s boat, but I relish the sense of newness and the alternative
view which Woodward gives of this familiar music. Angela Hewitt
or Murray Perahia may give us a richer, perhaps smoother or
more typically idiomatic ride, but I suspect these recordings,
once heard, will nag at your subconscious and keep bringing
you back.
I’ve left the Chromatic Fantasia & Fugue until last.
This is a piece which is always a tough nut to crack on piano,
and there is evidence of a few edits in Woodward’s recording.
My problem is, I can’t make up my mind what to think about it.
You trust your faithful reviewer to have an opinion one way
or another on just about everything musical, but I sincerely
hope you also trust they will tell you the truth. The truth
is, I can’t decide whether I like this performance or not, and
I also suspect that I’ll still be arguing with myself on the
subject in ten years hence. My initial feeling was that the
expressive gestures in the Fantasia were trying too hard,
and that the thing didn’t really hang together I quite the way
which would make it satisfying, to give it that sense of uneasily
flowing continuity which struggles, but always wins through.
For me, Woodward works the struggles continuously, with a kind
of mighty reluctance to resolve even beyond the last note. The
opening of the Fuga is grandiose, but the announcement
of the parts like a hammer on anvil – impressive but rather
unyielding. The tempo sways a little here and there, but it
is also a tour-de-force, compelling as well as rather heavy
in places. This is heavy music of course, and not to be approached
with light and ethereal airy-fairyness, but I’m yet to be 100%
convinced. While Woodward’s endings ‘fit’ with the rest of his
playing throughout the Partitas, I’m not really sympathetic
with the grand gestures which conclude each part of BWV 903.
The final trill - nearly 20 seconds from inception to final
turn - of the Fantasia is just too much of a good thing
to be much less than a parody, and the final overly heavy note
of the Fuga made me feel like Woodward was suckering
us with a knock-out punch, and defying us to take it seriously.
This is powerful playing in Les Demoiselles D’Avignon mould:
the beauty is forceful and craggy, hidden, still malleable,
sometimes even ugly in a non-pejorative sense – Bach taken beyond
the romantic into territory more in tune with contemporary
music or even Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, which goes beyond
pretty much everything. There is however a key which can unlock
some of the enigma in this performance, and you are offered
it with the introduction to the Partita No.6. There is
a kind of bridge which arcs between the Fantasia and
the way Woodward plays this opening Toccata and its fugal
development – BWV 903 in miniature. I may be inventing
my own false house of cards, but I have the feeling Woodward
the composer is at work behind the scenes throughout this disc
from the first note to the last, and if you can hear the whole
thing as a kind of concept album then the rewards increase to
beyond the sum of its parts.
This is a difficult recording to assess in conventional terms,
and I can make no guarantees that it will become a top part
of your collection. I can however be fairly sure it will change
your view of the ways in which Bach can be performed. As the
text on the website says, this “goes further and beyond anything
that might be considered orthodox or conservative … an organically
continuing development which uses and incorporates all the possibilities
that a first-rate modern instrument has to offer, just as Bach
would have done if the available technology in his lifetime
had allowed him.” My only absolute criticisms of this production
are the silly typographical design which forbids the use of
capital letters: an ugly and unnecessary complication, and the
lack of information on the music in the notes, which only consist
of an extensive and tedious puff on the career of the pianist.
We’re not likely to be hiring him and have probably already
bought the CD, so why the CV?
Dominy Clements
see also review by Jonathan
Woolf
Roger Woodward (piano)
