Woodward’s well-tempered clavier

Roger Woodward is the first Australian to record Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I. Shamistha de Soysa talks to the renowned pianist about Bach, and how the composer influenced and inspired his career.

‘Dragged screaming to church like any other kid in the suburbs’ is how pianist Roger Woodward describes his introduction to the music of JS Bach. Yet it created a spark that fuelled a lifelong admiration for his music. Although during his early career, Woodward was best known as an exponent of the music of Chopin, until he was 18 his interest lay primarily with church music and the organ works of Bach. Studying with Peter Vercoe and later Kenneth Long, he developed a high regard for Bach’s works as a cornerstone of technique.

Bach’s music, he says, opened him completely as a musician. Despite this lifelong journey with Bach and an extensive discography of some two dozen CDs, Woodward has not previously recorded any of his works. It is all the more gratifying therefore that this first outing with Bach was awarded the prestigious Preis der Deutschen Schallplatten Kritik (German Record Critics' Award) for ‘supreme achievement’ in a recording of a keyboard performance*. The CD opens with the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue BWV903, followed by the second and sixth keyboard Partitas BWV826 and 830 [Celestial Harmonies 13280-2].

For the recording, Woodward traveled to Wörthsee, in Bavaria, not far from Munich. This is appropriate since the cities in which Bach lived and worked are just to the north of there, and further north is the port city of Hamburg whose importance as a trading and publishing centre was so critical in the dissemination of Bach’s music. Today it’s the home of the Steinway piano.

Woodward performed on a Steinway model D grand piano – a piano which he knows well and with which he is totally at ease, having played it in his recording of Chopin’s Nocturnes. He describes it as a ‘beautiful singing instrument’. Although we can only imagine what Bach might have thought of a Steinway, his keyboard works are open to realisation on a variety of instruments. Woodward says Bach played an early piano modified from Cristofori by Silbermann, and saw in it the potential for playing legato cantabile – a style not previously possible. Bach himself played a variety of keyboard instruments. That the 48 Preludes and Fugues were written for ‘clavier’ indicates that they can suitably be performed on any keyboard instrument – the clavicembalo, clavichord or the fortepiano.

To read the full story become a Friend of 2MBS-FM 102.5.