Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I – Peter Hill

Some pianists approach the Well-Tempered Clavier as a mountain to be climbed, flags planted at each summit. Peter Hill climbs it like a man who already lives there — unhurried, familiar with every outcropping, in no particular rush to prove the altitude.

I came to this recording already converted. His Book II seemed to me one of the quietly essential Bach recordings of recent times, and I confess I played the opening Prelude in C major here half expecting disappointment. It didn’t come. The voicing is immaculate without calling attention to itself, the tempo relaxed but never slack. By the time the fugue’s subject creeps in, entry after entry, you’ve forgotten you’re listening to a pianist at all. You’re listening to Bach think.

This is not harpsichord playing transposed onto felt hammers. Nor is it the opposite sin: the plush, pedal-soaked Romanticism that still clings to some older recordings, the Edwin Fischer-and-after lineage filtered through too much Chopin. Hill’s instinct runs closer to Angela Hewitt in its clarity of line, though without quite her polish, her occasional glint of showmanship. Where Hewitt sometimes seems to be demonstrating something, Hill seems only to be noticing it, turning it over, letting you notice along with him. There’s an unforced intimacy to the playing that recalls, oddly, the late recordings of Rosalyn Tureck — a performer who has spent decades in the company of this score and has stopped needing to impress it.

Ornamentation he doles out sparingly, a trill here, a turn there, so that when decoration does arrive it registers as incident rather than habit. Compare this with pianists who reflexively gild every cadence. Hill’s restraint makes you hear the architecture underneath the lace.

The slow preludes are where he takes the greatest risks, and where the disc earns its keep. The Prelude in C-sharp minor, BWV 849, that long-breathed, almost liturgical piece Bach seems to have conceived for organ loft rather than keyboard at home, unfolds here with real spaciousness. The harmonic suspensions hang, decay, resolve on their own clock rather than the performer’s. Time slows without stopping. It’s a reading that trusts silence as much as sound, and few pianists manage that; most rush to fill the gap. Compare any number of brisker, more metronomic versions, Till Fellner’s, or even the elegant but cooler Schiff, and Hill’s expansiveness feels less like indulgence than conviction.

The E-flat minor Prelude, No. 8, with its enharmonic shadow-self the D-sharp minor fugue trailing behind it, gets similarly patient treatment. The spread chords breathe, the inner voices sigh without melodrama, and there’s an almost vocal quality to the phrasing. You can imagine a cellist drawing the same line, bow arm sinking into the string.

Faults? A few. The brisker preludes occasionally feel underpowered rhythmically. The dance element, and there is dance buried in much of this cycle, gigues and allemandes in disguise, sometimes submerges beneath the contemplative mood that governs the whole. Listeners wanting more physical brilliance should look to Angela Hewitt, or to Perahia’s scattered late Bach performances, for that kind of projection. Hill is after something else: intimacy over virtuosity, architecture over athleticism.

His booklet notes, movement by movement, show a scholar’s awareness of key relationships and structural pacing across the whole collection, not surprising given Hill’s parallel career studying Messiaen and twentieth-century repertoire. That awareness shows in the playing too: preludes and fugues feel placed, weighed against their neighbors, part of a long unfolding arc rather than twenty-four discrete recital pieces.

Does it replace Richter, that granite monument from the 1970s, or Gould’s wayward genius? No. Nothing replaces those, nor should it try. But as a modern piano version that trusts Bach’s material to generate its own drama, without rhetorical overlay, this Book I belongs on the same shelf as the finest available. I’ll be returning to it.