J.S. Bach: The Complete Works for Keyboard, Vol. 5, "Toccata & Weimar 1708-1717"

Benjamin Alard

Released on 12/11/2021 by harmonia mundi
Main artists: Benjamin Alard
Genre: Classical

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The scale and detail of Benjamin Alard’s project to record all of Bach’s keyboard music only becomes more apparent as the series progresses. For a quick reminder, he’s grouping works not by genre but by chronology, meaning that any given volume represents a huge breadth of style. Also of instrument types and timbres, because as painstaking as the actual programming has been his matching of repertoire to an array of beautiful instruments, often thinking well outside the usual box.

Volume 5 sits at the end of Bach’s youthful Weimar period, just before the action moves to the Cöthen, and those for whom Alard’s choices of keyboard have proved to be an especial source of fascination will want to know that this is the first volume for which Alard has introduced a clavichord to the mix – the only forerunner of the piano that was capable of producing dynamic variation by weight of touch alone. His chosen instrument is the Philharmonie de Paris’s silvery Émile Jobin clavichord (1998) after Christian Gottfried Friederici Gera (1773), and the soft, expressive intimacy it brings to Bach’s concerto transcriptions, such as the Concerto in G minor BWV 985 after a Telemann violin concerto, is very beguiling. As is the singing, dainty lilt he and it have brought to the Toccata in G major BWV 916. Which brings me to the volume’s other defining feature, which is its celebration of the art of the “toccata” (Italian for “touch”) style - one of improvisatory, unmeasured passages alternating with fugal sections. And Alard has in fact begun the whole programme with a nimbly elegant, fleet-footedly momentum-filled reading of the most famous toccata of all, the mighty Toccata and fugue in D minor BWV 565, which he performs on the bright-toned Quentin Blumenroeder organ in Paris’s Temple du Foyer de l’Âme.

As for the final instrument on the billing, it’s the welcome return of the big-toned beauty we heard on Volume 4 – the Philippe Humeau copy of a 1720 Hamburg pedal harpsichord, which here Alard uses to bring ringing drama (magnificent trills….) to works such as the Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 538.

In short, I’m already joyfully anticipating the Cöthen years. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz

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J.S. Bach: The Complete Works for Keyboard, Vol. 5, "Toccata & Weimar 1708-1717"

Benjamin Alard

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Toccata & Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565