Bach Well-Tempered Clavier Book I by Villar

Bach set himself an almost perverse challenge in 1722. Forty-eight preludes and fugues, two for every key in the chromatic scale, organized to prove — and perhaps to celebrate — the new system of equal temperament that was reshaping Western music. The Well-Tempered Clavier is a monument, yes, but it is also a laboratory, a devotional, a puzzle box, and at its greatest moments something close to a confession. No single performer has ever unlocked all of it.

Arthur Villar, a young Brazilian pianist who has been living with this music in public interpretation since 2008, now brings Book I to disc, played on a Steinway D in a disc that sounds immediately, almost disarmingly luminous. That clarity of sound matters more here than in almost any other repertoire. Bach’s counterpoint needs air around it.

What strikes you first is the absence of agenda.

So much Bach piano playing these days — and there is a great deal of it — arrives weighted with position papers. You are made aware, sometimes within the first few bars of the C major Prelude that opens BWV 846, whether the pianist intends to out-Gould Gould, to reclaim Bach for the Romantics, or to simulate a harpsichord with ten fingers and a sustain pedal. Villar seems genuinely uninterested in any of that. His playing proceeds from the music outward rather than from a theory inward, and the effect is unexpectedly refreshing — like hearing someone speak plainly in a room full of people performing their opinions.

He is not, to be clear, a dramatic interpreter. The mountain-climbing heroics of Roger Woodward’s Bach — that sense of enormous tectonic pressures building and releasing across a fugue’s architecture — are not what Villar is after. Where Woodward finds Himalayan grandeur, Villar finds something more like a well-tended landscape: the contours are clear, the distances honest, and you are not required to be afraid. This is not a criticism, exactly. Bach himself was not always reaching for the sublime. Sometimes he was simply solving problems, and the solutions were beautiful.

In terms of touch and pedaling, Villar is closer to Angela Hewitt than to anyone else I can think of — restrained, clean-fingered, attentive to the separation of voices. But where Hewitt’s rubato can tip toward the frankly Romantic (go back and listen to her C-sharp minor Prelude, BWV 849, and you will hear Chopin hovering at the edges), Villar tends to hold the tempo as a structuring principle rather than a rhetorical tool. This is mostly a virtue. Occasionally it makes you wish for a little more give, a little more willingness to let a phrase breathe past the barline.

The fugues are where this recording earns its keep.

Villar’s voicing in the four-voice fugue in C-sharp minor, BWV 849, is fastidious without being fussy — you hear the subject enter and re-enter with something like inevitability, and the stretto passages build real pressure. The B-flat minor Fugue, BWV 867, one of the most austere and searching pieces Bach ever wrote, gets a reading of quiet intensity; Villar does not inflate it, does not reach for tragedy, and the result is more affecting than most more overtly emotional accounts I have heard. Restraint, it turns out, is its own kind of eloquence.

The C major Prelude — everyone’s first encounter with this collection, the one Gounod draped in Ave Maria and thereby made almost unlistenable for a generation — is dispatched with lovely simplicity, each arpeggiated figure placed with care but without ostentation. Gould’s ghost does not visit. Neither does Richter’s. This is Villar’s own.

Glenn Gould, of course, remains the inescapable reference point for any pianist approaching Bach’s keyboard music, and probably will forever. His 1963 Well-Tempered Clavier recordings — part of them, anyway — still sound like they arrived from another dimension. But the influence has also been a kind of tyranny, pushing pianists either toward imitation or into theatrical reaction against him. Villar, to his credit, seems to have simply declined the argument.

There are moments where more would serve the music better. The E major Prelude, BWV 854, wants a lightness of touch that approaches the improvisatory, and Villar keeps it perhaps a shade too measured. And in a few of the longer fugues, the line between purposeful steadiness and understatement grows thin. But these are negotiable objections.

This is a recording made with seriousness, intelligence, and genuine love for the material. It does not redefine the Well-Tempered Clavier. It does not need to.