Bach Well-Tempered Clavier Book II – Guillot

Do we really need another album of Das wohltemperierte Clavier, Book II? The honest answer is: probably not. But this one comes with a genuinely compelling reason to pay attention.

Sébastien Guillot has built his reading around the so-called “Londoner Originalhandschrift” — Fassung A, the London autograph — a manuscript copied out in the hands of Bach himself and his second wife, Anna Magdalena. The 1744 copy has long held the field as authoritative, partly because the student who worked on it was apparently receiving Bach’s own late revisions. Fair enough. But the older family manuscript contains a remarkable scatter of melodic, rhythmic, and ornamental variants, and the argument that one source simply supersedes the other starts to look shakier the more closely you listen here.

Think of the unrevised Sibelius Violin Concerto, or the various Bruckner symphonic versions — works where the “earlier” text turns out to be not a rough draft but a different, fully realized thing. The Bach autograph feels like that.

The variants announce themselves immediately. The opening C major Prelude arrives stripped of those little ornamental turns on the third beat of bar one and the first beat of bar two — the ones you’ve been hearing your whole life. Just clean sixteenth notes. Disorienting, briefly, then oddly clarifying. And once you’ve noticed that, you start listening differently to everything. The inner voices of the C-sharp major Prelude — yes, they really are altered, and in ways that feel less like revision than reconsideration. You become, almost against your will, a kind of textual detective.

What remains genuinely puzzling is that nobody thought to record this source before. The manuscript has been sitting there.

Guillot plays a 1993 harpsichord built by O. Fadini after a 1733 Paris instrument by F. Blanchet, and it suits this music well — a warm, resonant tone with real coloristic variety, nothing brittle or stingy in the upper register. The recording, made in a church acoustic with microphones placed close but not aggressively so, catches the instrument’s detail without exposing it to an unflattering clinical light. Christine Schornsheim’s complete Wohltemperierte Clavier on Capriccio has more shimmer in the upper partials — though whether that’s the instrument or the engineering is genuinely hard to say.

Guillot’s playing is, for the most part, distinguished. He uses a subtle rhythmic flexibility — a slight drawing-back, a momentary suspension — to compensate for the harpsichord’s famous inability to shade dynamics, and it mostly works. Where it doesn’t is in pieces like the D major Prelude, No. 5, where his tempo drifts in ways that feel unmoored rather than expressive, the pulse becoming genuinely ambiguous in a way that serves nobody. Those moments are infrequent. But they’re there.

Still — the source alone makes this worth your time. Scholarship and music-making pulling in the same direction. That doesn’t happen as often as it should.