Johann Sebastian Bach: Capriccio BWV 992 - Kenneth Gilbert

Johann Sebastian Bach
Capriccio BWV 992
Kenneth Gilbert
Archiv 437 555-2

So strong and so prevalent is the image of Bach the solid bourgeois, the revered master, the father of a score of children, that it is easy to lose sight of him as the brilliant, self-confident but headstrong youth. The works in this excellent issue, played on a fine Couchet-Blanchet-Taskin instrument in the resonant (but not excessively so) acoustics of the Chartres museum, were all written in his younger days - the Capriccio (one of his very earliest extant keyboard compositions) in his late teens when an elder brother went off to Sweden (and thence to Constantinople), the three Toccatas before the age of 25, the Aria variata (his only set of variations other than the late Goldberg) and the A minor Prelude and Fugue (the one he was to rework for the Triple Concerto) by 30. The influences on him are still evident: Kuhnau's programmatic Biblical sonatas for the Capriccio (whose most striking movements are a lament on a ground bass and the air imitating the postillion's posthorn); Buxtehude, plus Italian and French features, for the sectional Toccatas; Bohm and Vivaldi respectively for the other two works. The Italian commentator here, but not the other language writers, interestingly postulates a violin origin for the Aria variata which except for the theme and the final variation is almost entirely in only two parts.

Kenneth Gilbert's performances are a delight, with his arresting treatment of quasi-improvisatory passages in the Toccatas (though even he cannot disguise Bach's overlong mechanical sequences in the F sharp minor work), his clarity and his lively but steady rhythmic drive in the long fugues (the C minor, which turns into a double-figure, the most extensive of all). Only in the F sharp minor's final fugue did I feel the tempo he adopts too stolid: otherwise the warmest of recommendations for this disc.

Lionel Salter, Gramophone 1993