peterws wrote:So much Bach just begs for light and shade; expression is everything;
I don't disagree, and neither I think would Bach entirely (making exception for his obvious bent toward the "learned" style, vs something like the Empfindsamkeit of his son C.P.E.) as his known preference for music-making at home was the clavichord (which, incidentally, it would be wonderful to have a better model of in Pianoteq than the Neupert we currently have)... but it's simply impossible to articulate Bach's music in the way we know he spoke it on the modern piano, so one ends up making all sorts of "translations" which, no doubt lovely in their own right, objectively take us afield from Bach's actual conception. For my part, not being possessed of the hubris to presume that my musicianship is in any way even close to being superior to that of Bach's, I prefer to try to listen and learn from the master on his own terms and not that dictated by the sort of translations necessary when using something like the modern piano. An interesting experiment however is to play Bach on early pianos where one can achieve both coloristic effects and proper articulations... though it's a pity Bach was so dismissive of the Silbermanns he had available to him... if only he'd lived another 20 years or so I think he would have, quite literally, "changed his tune"!
the guy was so far ahead of his time. I bet he'd be in thrall to some of the digitals on offer now. I bet they all would.
We part ways here, I'm afraid: Bach et al, being indeed truly great, were emphatically composers of their time who demonstrably wrote idiomatically for the instruments they had at hand and, if we're going to play the idle conjecture game, I to the contrary bet they all would have written quite differently for the sort of instruments we have available today...
But we're back in accord here... We certainly are fortunate to have something like Pianoteq where it's possible to have all these amazing possibilities to try this stuff out for ones self and not be slavishly stuck to just one sort of piano as though it were the end-all-be-all of music making!
Matthieu 7:6