Search - Beatrice Berthold: piano :: Music of Tribute, Vol. 5: J. S. Bach

The fifth volume of Labor s on-going "Music of Tribute" series, a solo album by the outstanding young German pianist Beatrice Berthold, features a series of homages to J.S. Bach from French, Swiss, Polish, Hungarian, Russian and American composers plus works by the great German master himself including his famous "Italian Concerto," a prelude and fugue from "The Well-Tempered Clavier" and a series of preludes and fugues, taken from the teaching notebooks created for and by Bach's sons under their father's supervision. Many of the pieces by or attributed to Bach will be familiar to anyone who has ever studied or played classical piano. All these works are performed by the German pianist who has become noted, not only for her Bach but also for her readings of Russian, French and, in particular, Spanish and Latin American music. A highlight is her performance of the final Bachianas Brasileiras No. 4, four movements for piano solo by Heitor Villa-Lobos which mix Brazilian popular music and folk song with the influence of Bach. Many of the other tribute pieces are specifically based on the letters B-A-C-H, which, in German musical spelling, denote the tones B-flat, A, C, B natural. Examples of pieces based on this motto motif include a Prelude and Fugue for left hand only by the great piano virtuoso Leopold Godowsky and a Valse-Impromptu by Francis Poulenc. There is also the final Prelude and Fugue from Dmitri Shostakovich's masterful set of 24 and another group includes tributes by the Hungarian composers Béla Bartók and György Kurtág as well as the pioneering American minimalist Terry Riley. A co-production with Saarländischer Rundfunk, Saarbrücken, Germany