J.S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier

With his first recording of The Well Tempered Clavier (Book 1) Pinnock explores the summit of Bach's intellectual and contrapuntal mastery "My journey with the Well Tempered Clavier has been life long. I first encountered it at about 12 years old when someone gave me a pink and gold bound volume, the old Czerny edition, which we now know to be notoriously unreliable. This gave me hours of discovery. A few years later, I heard all the preludes and fugues played on the piano on the radio, and I was hooked. In my twenties I myself recorded some preludes and fugues for radio broadcast, and I knew then that one day I would play them all. The mountain seemed insurmountable, however, and Bach a formidable and severe task master how could I possibly delve into the density of some of those fugues, let alone understand them?

So, although I subsequently performed various others of the preludes and fugues, any plan to record all of them was repeatedly postponed by increments of ten years until quite recently, when I decided I could put it off no longer. Now they will be a central part of me for the rest of my life."