The famous conductor Hans von Bülow, slightly less famous as a pianist now and nearly forgotten as a composer, remains most present to modern music lovers either as the jilted husband of Cosima von ...

Accessibility of knowledge was crucial to the Enlightenment. That ethos was embodied in the celebrated Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert, the first of its seventeen volumes appearing in 1751, the ...

Piotr Anderszewski has recorded Book II of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, sort of. I’ll explain in a moment. Anderszewski is the Polish pianist born in 1969: brilliant, versatile, and individualistic.

Keith Jarrett and Johann Sebastian Bach go back a long way. Between 1722 and 1742, Bach composed two sets of preludes and fugues in all twenty-four major and minor keys, written for keyboard; the ...

The legendary German composer's creation is the most influential piano work in music history, played to this day by musicians who want to perfect their technique. Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, ...

Christophe Rousset, a remarkable harpsichordist and conductor who occupies a place of high honor among Baroque-music interpreters, scores a triumph with this magisterial reading of one of the ...

The preludes and fugues that make up Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” operate on multiple levels at once — they’re a compilation of techniques for keyboard writing, a polemic on the subject of tuning ...

On the title page of “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Bach’s monumental keyboard collection of preludes and fugues in all the major and minor keys, the composer wrote that he intended it “for the profit ...