Charles Rosen - Art of Fugue. It was as I remembered, this is very near analogous to Leonhardt’s DHM recording except on piano. There is little variation in dynamics and flamboyant flair, Rosen like Leonhardt communicates the genius of AoF through simplicity. He plays with a lightness of touch, when he choses a tempo he more or less sticks with it (in less than a fifth of the contrapuncti there are some very short sections where he will briefly speed up, but this sounds like he has to or the ornamentation would sound off). And like Leonhardt can also be quite transcendental and he achieves this with simple means like playing Contrapunctus V with a slower tempo. Contrapunctus VII, had this been in a blind test I would immediately thought this was Jörg Demus (judging by that “live” account of WTC that he plays on some of his own pianos) with how Rosen interweaves the various voices. It’s also not overly legato heavy, which for some reason can make AoF a bit more boring to listen to, maybe because it homogenizes things too much- it was already about 2 AM which is way past when I’m normally up but I was having another love affair with the ESL57 which never seems to end and in the mood to hear recording after recording. I was apparently pretty tired because I feel asleep immediately when I went to bed, but Rosen captivated my attention with in the zone undivided listening through two LP length CDs worth well into the early morning.
Overall a rather mature account. I’m not sure if I would have liked this early on in my classical listening when I heard Sokolov and a bit later Koroliov (this took more warming up to coming from Sokolov). But in comparison the deficiencies of both of them is rather obvious. Rosen is up there with the very best I’ve heard, if not the very best on piano.
Another analogy for people that have heard Uchida playing Diabelli Variations. This is like the 180 degree opposite of that.
