Things will continue to be quiet here for a while. Tripos starts tomorrow, with piles of marking to come. But in one way or another I’ve already been marking all week (reading dissertations and submitted essays, interspersed with looking at the work submitted by shortlisted candidates for the Analysis studentship). Let’s just say it’s been a pretty mixed experience.
To keep myself going, I’ve just got Angela Hewitt’s new version of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier to listen to between scripts. It seems to be the season for re-recordings by artists who have already made classic disks. As I noted here, Viktoria Mullova has released another version of the Partitas (stunning); Imogen Cooper is starting to release another Schubert cycle (very warmly reviewed, and I’ve just sent off for the first disks). And here Hewitt is giving us another version of the 48. Her previous version was about my favourite: this one might take some getting used to, as it is more ‘more expressive’, ‘more elastic’, than the earlier one. But on a first listen to the first couple of disks, I think I could warm to it.
Thanks for the tip, that’s such a great recording. Beautiful and impeccable. Definitely worth buying, listening to, and listening to again.
I’ve been listening to this. The thought that keeps popping into my mind is that it’s more a series of Reflections or Meditations on the WTC than a recital of the WTC itself. I keep hearing other people’s WTCs in the spaces between notes in her new version. I guess this should make it sound self-conscious or something, but it doesn’t. It’s really working for me.