Bach: Clavier Übung III – Kei Koïto

Kei Koïto plays the organ the way a good editor reads a manuscript — with patience, with an eye for what the composer actually wrote rather than what tradition insists he meant. That may sound like faint praise. It isn’t. Bach’s Clavier Übung III has attracted plenty of interpreters who mistake bulk for majesty, who lean on the tremendous E-flat prelude that opens the set as though it were Wagner and forget that most of what follows is intimate, even domestic, music — chorale settings meant to instruct as much as to dazzle.

This is a strange and wonderful publication to begin with. Bach issued it in 1739 as a kind of theological-pedagogical statement, a compendium disguised as a mass — Kyrie, Gloria, the catechism chorales, the duetti, all bracketed by that mighty prelude and fugue. Nobody was expected to play the whole thing straight through in church. It’s an anthology, a toolbox. Koïto and her production team understand this, and their solution — recording the chorale melodies themselves, sung, alongside the organ settings — turns out to be more than a novelty. It’s genuinely illuminating.

Hearing Agnès Mellon or Andreas Scholl intone the bare Lutheran hymn tune before Koïto elaborates it on the organ changes how you listen. Suddenly you catch Bach’s harmonic sleight of hand, the way a stepwise melody fragment becomes, in his hands, a fugal subject worked through three or four voices. Gerd Türk’s tenor has an unforced, slightly reedy quality that sits well against the organ’s own reed stops. Ulrich Messthaler anchors the bass lines with a gravity that never turns ponderous. Dominique Vellard’s direction of these singers is understated — no vibrato-laden Romantic phrasing, no arch attempts at “expression.” Just the tune, clean, the way a congregation in Kampen might once have half-remembered it before the organ took over.

The recorded sound at St. Nicholas of Bovenkerk has that silvery, slightly astringent character typical of well-preserved Dutch instruments, with mixtures that bite without shrieking. Koïto’s registration choices throughout favor restraint. BWV 552, the great prelude, could easily become bombastic in lesser hands; she keeps the pedal from swamping the manual work, lets the fugue’s three subjects declare themselves one at a time rather than arriving as an undifferentiated wall of sound.

Where she’s most persuasive, though, is in the smaller chorales — the manualiter settings meant for a modest positive organ, played here with a touch so light you’d swear she was thinking of the clavichord rather than the church organ. BWV 675, that gently pastoral trio setting, unfolds with real songfulness; each voice has its own color, its own breath, nothing forced into prominence. BWV 674 works almost as a demonstration piece for registration itself — the fugal voices emerge with startling clarity, not through any exaggeration of tempo or articulation but simply because she’s chosen stops that let each line speak in its own register without crowding its neighbors.

Does the whole two-disc traversal sustain interest across more than two hours? I confess a few of the smaller duetti settings blur together on a single sitting — this is, after all, reference material as much as recital repertoire, and Bach never intended anyone to absorb it end to end. But taken in installments, as the composer surely imagined it would be used, this set rewards attentive return visits.

Koïto’s earlier recording of the trio sonatas, also for Harmonic, remains among the finest available — lucid, unforced, alive to the dance rhythms buried in those deceptively academic-sounding movements. This Clavier Übung III belongs on the same shelf. It won’t replace period-instrument accounts by Peter Hurford or Ton Koopman in every listener’s affections, and some will miss a bigger, more overtly virtuosic profile in the outer movements. But for anyone wanting to hear this strange, magnificent compendium as Bach’s own contemporaries might have understood it — hymn tune first, elaboration second, doctrine embedded in the counterpoint — this disc has few rivals.