the counterpoint is incredible in the toccata. you have arpeggiation on one register with harmony accented by mordents on the opposite register then it switches. its so simple but it makes the music so rich. Bach uses this technique to develop an incredible rhythm and flow almost as if the piece were breathing.
Bach always impress me with his phenomenal music. What a timeless piece this is, and extremely difficult to play. The saraband has some of the most complex rhythms and ornamentations of all. Beautiful!
Best performance! 03:32 - 04:06 one of the most beautiful Bach passages ever. I listen to it over and over again but that circle of fifths progression at 4:00 never ceases to overwhelm my emotions!! I've been obsessed with those two measures for a few months now. It's impressive how much time 4 seconds of Bach can take for you to grasp.
This Piece truly is epic, one of the best of Bach's keyboard output (and, by extension, one of the best of the whole keyboard instruments' Repertoire).
Gerubach, this is a tremendous work of love. I can't fathom the quantity of work and patience you put into these wonderful animated scores. Thank you, very much.
Gracias Gerubach, tremendo trabajo que te mandas con tus magníficos videos... ¡Qué tal diferencia de calidad! No hay punto de comparación entre las obras de Bach y de los otros músicos. Ese courante me parece muy pero muy misterioso
This whole partita is gorgeous! Heavenly intricate music; incredibly beautiful! I cannot get enough of it. I’ve instructed my family to play the Allemande on my cremation! (I’m only 79, so it may take some time 😊)
This performance of the Gigue is incorrect, in that it is meant to be a slow moving Gigue in common time, similar to the Gigue in the first French Suite. This slow-moving type of Gigue was developed by the French lutenists, particularly Denis Gautier. In this performance the rhythms are played as if the Gigue is in 12/8.
I feel so pleasured to have a wonderful resource to help my study of this beautiful work on the piano. I will be listening to more videos on your channel!! This was particularly useful for me in terms of interesting time signature and rhythm business in the Gigue. Also really enjoyed the Sarabande, and the fact this is on a harpsichord has really inspired me to learn to play the harpsichord, which I will be doing from September. Thank you so much!
Dear Sir the choice of Harpsichord like instrument was really a good one. I can actually hear the ornamentals which are often not audible enough with piano. The Edgy metal on metal sound allows for better understanding of the composition's structure.
The note highlighting in the Corrente is a masterpiece! You're like the cameraman running alongside olympic sprinters. Also, listening closely to the Toccata, I just noticed a fantastic compositional detail. After 5:45, the two-part counterpoint theme from the toccata returns (in 3-part counterpoint) as part of the fugue! Such a cool transition; I never noticed it because it fits into the fugue so smoothly.
Bach wrote all Masterpieces, However the Toccata is more fascinating of the Corrente if you focus on its depth and anyway if you had listend to all Bach's works for keyboard and for Choral Music you wouldn't have said that :)
That syncopation is a traditionally French way of playing the harpsichord. In French or French-style harpsichord music the performer is allowed a lot of artistic license regarding note values and ornamentation, often causing the music to sound a lot different from how it's written.
The courante... Oh my goodness I've never seen anything like it, it's like aliens showing me alien technology for the first time! I don't know what's more astounding, the fact that people have the ability to play it or the fact a human being created something so amazing.
The opening Toccata blends with Fugue so naturally: notice how it first announces the fugue (which is structurally inspired from it), lets it unravel then completes with conclusion. It is impossible to find any other words than pure perfection: beauty condensed at atomic level. Nothing more could be said... The ending Gigue is yet another display of perfection, but from a different angle. Here it's theme and, later, its inversion talking. Probably Bach, if not a composer, would have been an astonishing mathematician with his ability to find patterns in chaos and blend them meaningfully into a rock-solid system. For me, as a programmer, he will always be endless source of inspiration:
***** Yes! And the second (last) piece is Bach's Partita No.2 for solo Violin (Piano Version arranged by Busoni) ,I Hope you make a video of this piece (piano version) gerubach
Genius. Who wrote it? Just kidding. Brilliant in its simplicity. Inspired from on high. Even this performance couldn't dampen the true luster of its original spirit of intent. Would like to hear it played en ensamble. There is so much here. So many voices working en co - operation. Remarkable . Thanks for sharing your understandings... with the unworthy.
Thomas Field I prefer the Toccata, it has that 'inevitable' motion of 'rolling down the hill' or pushing up the hill needing much will power. I have not heard any piece like that ever.
Thomas Field I looked at Gavotte, and did not like on the piano, but whatever the strings used for this rendition was quite beautiful, definitely love to play some parts of it. Gerubach's graphical renditions are quite useful to understand the composition structures and repeatitions, I suspect by looking at these graphical renditions that the composition had several layers, and some layers had gaps which needed to be connected somehow.
Thanks sir for your Gurubach service. Never heard this before your channel. I look no further. I love this whole suite, but that Courante just jumped out at me. Bach says, " Ok you want a french dance? Here you go try this out. " Classic Bach all the way through. " So epitome of baroque and totally Bach. I usually don't get sucked into this dance that easy. Ahh... Great!
For those who wonder about the odd time signature of the gigue, it's like a double 2/2 (crossed C), but I'll agree it looks like a coda sign. I suppose the same engraving piece was used.
Honestly, I consider Trevor Pinnock the harpsichord version of Glenn Gould. Pinnock is the kind of musician that would have made Bach proud to have him play his music.
The Gigue sounds like 2 fire chariots end up meeting together at tip point touching, a deadly dance in the high sky, while diving down from high altitudes & rising back up. As to say LOOK, the world is being judged!! *Chills *Chills *Chills!!
I dont know when this opus drifted to Spain and Andalucia, but the first minute of Toccata sounds really much flamenco guitar. German Hubert Käppel transcripted the whole partita succesfully for classical guitar.
The Gavotte, "Tempo de Gavotta", is a Gavotte and starts on the third beat. The Gigue is written in a style typical of Bach in found in many of his suites in 4 beats to the bar, but unlike a Gavotte does not start on the third beat. The Gigue is in imitative polyphony (fuge like) which in the b section the thematic material is inverted (upside down). J S Bach knew what he is was doing.
Is there a reason the performer is playing the 16th note rhythms the same as the triplet rhythms in the Gavotte (not subdividing a dotted eighth-sixteenth figure for example, instead playing it as if it was a triplet)? Is that a stylistic thing?
It’s quite historical. And also a matter of printing in the old days. You got that right in both cases. Publishers never printed otherwise until late in the nineteenth century. But the sixteenth note was definitely meant to go with the third so called triplet note (which should note really be regarded as a triplet). It’s a performing rule in all treatises that runs as late as Schubert, although seldom musicians would dare play Schubert that way, today, even if it works pretty well, in fact (Winterreise). So, the third triplet note goes with the sixteenth note exactly as Trevor plays it here. It’s also revealing, should you come closer to look at the harmony. But it remains a stylistic figure of musical speech indeed. It’s not really related to French style, though, as far as I remember from my harpsichord studies. Read Couperin (The Art of Playing The Harpsichord) to tell the difference. Sorry about my English. It may not be clear enough (not my mother tongue : I’m French - Greetings from Paris !).
The gigue is played weirdly. For the dotted notes, Trevor plays them correctly, but on the pairs of eighth notes, he swings them like dotted triplets, and where there are two sixteenths and an eighth, he plays them as triplets. He must have been using a different edition of sheet music than what's displayed here.
It's a medieval time signature equivalent to 9/4. Bach was just using it incorrectly. He might have assumed that since 2/2 is a semicircle with a line through it then this time signature (a full circle with a line through it) must have meant 4/2.
@@barney6888 Your philistinism is showing, sir. Bach was a human being and he made mistakes like any other human being. Since no autograph of this piece has survived, it's also possible that the time signature might have been the mistake of a copyist. Whether it was Bach or his copyist, someone definitely made a mistake somewhere along the line since the Gigue's time signature does not correspond to the way the music is written at all.
Trevor Pinnock is probably the best harpsichordist in the last 100 years. But once you have heard Glenn Gould play this piece, that's it. It's over. He owns it.
+Jer TheJambon Jumping in the middle of this, I think it is quite possible, however it will be far more sophisticated. Our problem these days is retail software and millions of listeners, once we get over that hump many Bachs will be appear and use the software capabilities and advanced synthesizers , and create amazing compositions. There is a problem with the classical music community, that of atavism, but in due time they think differently. I like to thank GeruBach again because his videos make it easy to study such important works.
More sophisticated maybe, but I don't know. For me something from the 21st century that would be able to echo the power of Bach's musicality should not be about the software or synthetizers or whatever. Bach's power, at least to me, dwells in its "simple difficulty". I feel Bach was a clever composer who managed to get complex only by starting from the purest and simplest musical thought. The thing with him is that it sometimes appears as obvious whereas he has that cleverness that makes it way more deep. Someone from the 21st century should focus on that mainly, the musical idea and his way to develop it.
I could hear traces of Christian Pezold's Toccata in B(?) . Once it moves it cannot stop, so there is a sense of rolling down the hill you have to force it to stop. Then there are simpler melodies which are turned into more complex by an Arpeggio.
The gigue has a sort of but not really swing feel. The eighth notes give the swing feel but the 2 sixteenth note-one eighth note group sound like eighth note triplets which is odd. I like it though.
I have a question, what exactly is the instrument used for the sixth piece of this suite? It's some sort of plucked string isntrument, is it a keyboard instrument?
It's the lute stop. Something like a cloth presses upon the strings and bumps them; they don't sound like metal anymore, more like gut, just as a lute. French harpsichords had this feature at that Era...
Just a quick search will reveal Perahia and GG playing 4/2 or 8/4. Bach is capable of writing 24/8 if he wants. Why wouldn't he? I have always found Pinnock to be impeccable and if there is an argument for presenting this in triplet time, fine. I'll settle with creative/interpretive leeway. Or, that the time signature historically stood for both. However, I find it suspicious as I do not, for a second, see any reason to support any argument that Bach made an error, and it has nothing to do with idol worship of the composer. Oh, and I forgot, the time signature means 2 whole notes per bar. If you want to bend the rhythm into triplets, be my guest, fill your boots. Play the piece on upside down, well tempered Campbell soup tins for all I care. Don't argue that it's called a "gigue", therefore by some academic law it MUST be triplets. These movements have names that barely correspond with the original dance or cantabile, especially when it comes to Bach. It's called creativity.
Go and listen to some of Couperin’s gigues. Some are triplet-less! Oh, the horrors, our precious academic rule is violated!!!!!!!! Blasphemy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There. Gigues need not contain triplets.
+Denny Hamrick, I think the instrument in the gavotte is actually something called a "lute-harpsichord". See here: www.baroquemusic.org/barluthp.html which leads to another page with a sample of its sound here: www.baroquecds.com/740Web.html. And it's really magnificent! First time I heard it, I was like, "What the heck was *that*??"
I prefer Gould for the first half of the partita (the toccata and fugue up to the courante). But his mechanical, pointillistic approach starts to get really grating on the 2nd half (by the time the gigue comes up I'm well past done). This Pinnock rendition with the harpsichord maintains a warmth and spontaneity that completes the partita for me. Awesome.
