Baroque Performance Practice

[FideLeo]

...and in a way I find, that The AoF is written entirely in its own unique timeless style.

I don't really share this finding of yours, sorry to say.  For me, some fugues in WTC sound as
self-consciously retro as many of the contrapuncti.  Applying "rhetorical" gestures in these pieces
can seem pretty "forced," depending on one's own feel about the music (as a listener in the 20th/21st
century).

[prémont]

I don't really share this finding of yours, sorry to say.  For me, some fugues in WTC sound as
self-consciously retro as many of the contrapuncti.  Applying "rhetorical" gestures in these pieces
can seem pretty "forced," depending on one's own feel about the music (as a listener in the 20th/21st
century).

In the end I think, it is about, how much we want to try to recreate the presumed original intentions of the music, if we are capable of doing it at all after all these years with romantic performance traditions.
Maybe you should read Harnoncourts "Musik als Klangrede". 

[FideLeo]

In the end I think, it is about, how much we want to try to recreate the presumed original intentions of the music, if we are capable of doing it at all after all these years with romantic performance traditions.
Maybe you should read Harnoncourts "Musik als Klangrede". 

I do want to hear the "presumed original intentions of the music" recreated, except that that will not be in the "rhetorical" way which you specified.

I have read the Harnoncourt and I think his argument is too ambitious as some kind of "all purpose theory" for early music.

[M forever]

You apparently haven't understood the book. There is no "all purpose theory" in there. Klangrede is just one of many aspects of "early" or let's say, "earlier" music performance which are discussed in the book.