April 12: Complete Fantasies for Solo Keyboard (BWV 903, 904, 906, 917, 918, 922, 944); Evan Shinners, piano

Too much perspective.

Because all people die and are replaced by others (👎), we know Bach’s music only through interpretations created in the era of recorded sound. I wonder what Mendelssohn and Liszt and Brahms sounded like at the piano, and what of Bach at the organ? With my time machine, I would have followed Beethoven around Vienna and bootlegged his improvised house concerts in the salons of the aristocrats he loathed and envied.

Each of these masters put in so much effort to achieve greatness, and then, dead, every single one of them.

We’ve lost so much.

Then again there are weird recent counterexamples to my fist-shaking: sometimes I prefer the recordings of interpreters to the composers themselves. Rachmaninoff is not the greatest performer of his own works, and I like Colin Currie’s recent “Music for 18 Musicians” more than Steve Reich’s own landmark recording.

So I’ll get sunny for a moment and talk about the pleasures of discovering new corners of compositions through their unique performers. Fresh interpretations teach us about the performing artist, about the Bach we thought we knew, and also, and always, ourselves.

It’s a pleasure to write today about Evan Shinners’ recordings of the Complete Fantasies for Solo Keyboard (Apple Music, Spotify). Two cheers for the lo-fi cover art featuring beautiful women in intense concentration, playing competitive chess:

Evan is a scholar and a teacher, and he’s devoted his professional life to recording and interpreting Bach’s works. (Evan reached out to me after I recommended his deep-dive blog and podcast called “WTF Bach,” and I’ll be writing more about his new Bach releases in May. I especially recommend his recording of the French Suites, and his podcast episode with one of my musical heroes, Brad Mehldau.)

Outside of a few emails we exchanged, I don’t know Evan, but his personality emanates from this recording. (I felt the same way about Vikingur Olafssohn’s Goldbergs.) Evan imbues the music with great spirit and a deliberate care borne from a deep knowledge of the text. It’s brains and humor, my favorite.

Let’s dig into the music.

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For BWV 906 (the C Minor Fantasy & Fugue) I’m going to pull a few different interpretations to show how different the same piece sounds under different fingers:

The master Sviatoslav Richter, steadying the wild horses that he himself unleashed:

Here’s Joao Carlos Martins, playing fast for its own sake:

Glenn Gould is super slow, charming and bizarre but he loses the song midway:

Karl Richter, confident and bold at the harpsichord:

Evan Shinners is all lightness and clarity, spirited staccatos, very playful:

In the fugue, Shinners lets the voices fall ever so slightly out of sync and achieves a kind of wobbly grace:

I love the chromatic waves of the D Minor Fantasy BWV 903:

In the Fugue for the same piece, Bach via Shinners prefigures Thelonious Monk; it’s the first note of the third measure in the clip below:

Igor Levit doesn’t lean into that dissonance in his recent recording:

There’s an almost boogie-woogie feel to parts of BWV 922 (Fantasy in A Minor):

This moment in the fugue wouldn’t be out of place in Beethoven:

And finally, the A Minor Fugue in BWV 944 is dense with melody and full chordal harmony. So beautiful. Here’s a snip to end this recap — go have listen to the whole thing: