Publisher description

This diversified collection guides students to develop stylistic performances of Bach's keyboard works. Among the 27 selections are numerous menuets, "short" preludes and suite movements. The introductory material contains an excellent discussion of ornamentation, rhythm, articulation, tempo and dynamics in the keyboard music of this master composer.

Published within the 'Signature' Series, a series of authoritative performing editions of standard keyboard works, prepared from original sources by leading scholars. Also includes informative introductions and performance notes.

All 48 preludes and fugues in all major and minor keys. Authoritative Bach-Gesellschaft edition. Explanation of ornaments in English, tempo indications, music corrections.

Discussion of various aspects of Bach's keyboard techniques with special emphasis on fingering.

(Amadeus). In this concise and accessible volume, a noted keyboard artist and Bach specialist takes a fresh look at the performance of J. S. Bach's keyboard music. Addressing the nonspecialist player, Richard Troeger presents a wide range of historical information and discusses its musical applications. The author shares accounts of the musical styles Bach employed and the instruments he knew. In direct and pragmatic terms, he clarifies the importance of notational and style details as guides to the composer's intentions, particularly emphasizing changes in notational norms between Bach's time and the present. Troeger offers core information on dynamics, articulation, tempo, rhythm, ornamentation and accompaniment. He considers controversial issues as well, establishing the importance of the clavichord in Bach's milieu and examining the link between baroque music and rhetoric a dramatic relationship that can bring great vitality to performance.

Along with Beethoven's sonatas and the purely idiomatic works for piano of Chopin and Debussy, the solo keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach represents the heart of the pianist's repertory; in the more specialized field of music for the organ, Bach's primacy seems beyond challenge. This listener's guide to Bach's music for the keyboard provides the interested amateur with a close but non-technical look at these two crucial parts of the master's oeuvre. The composer's tendency to work exhaustively in tightly structured formats--such as the 48 preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier--provides a natural framework for this study; but the power, beauty, high polish, and occasionally the sheer strangeness of Bach's imagination are carefully examined as well [Publisher description].