Album: J.S. Bach – The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II
Artist: Pierre-Laurent Aimard
Label: Pentatone
Release year: 2025
Format: Digital / CD
Available on all streaming platforms
By Damián Autorino
Editor at Moto Perpetuo
Pierre-Laurent Aimard and the architecture of Bach
Pierre-Laurent Aimard is widely recognised for his long-standing dedication to contemporary music, shaped by early collaborations with Pierre Boulez, Ensemble InterContemporain, and composers such as Ligeti, Messiaen, Carter, Benjamin and Murail. Yet Bach has remained one of the rare classical pillars of his discography. After The Art of Fugue (2008) and Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier (2014), this new recording of Book II extends a relationship marked by clarity, structural insight and intellectual finesse. An exclusive Pentatone artist since 2017, Aimard continues to use the label as a home for his major artistic projects.
Book II represents a later, more exploratory stage in Bach’s thinking: the harmony is more chromatic, the counterpoint denser, and the expressive palette broader than in Book I. Aimard approaches this landscape with a dual perspective — historically informed in its attention to articulation, gesture and colour, yet shaped by the contemporary sensibility that defines his artistic identity. The result is a reading in which the music’s architecture is always transparent, even in its most intricate pages.
Phrasing unfolds with remarkable clarity, each line shaped with direction and purpose. Dynamics remain deliberately contained, favouring transparency over pianistic weight and subtly evoking the sound world of historical keyboards without attempting imitation. Rather than foregrounding expressive rhetoric, Aimard lets the structure breathe, allowing the contrapuntal design and harmonic tensions of Book II to emerge with natural balance.
Bach on the modern piano admits a wide range of interpretative approaches, from more overtly expressive and Romantic readings to those informed by historical awareness. Aimard leans toward the latter, integrating this perspective into a modern, highly analytical pianistic language that privileges clarity and structural coherence. His perspective — lucid, balanced and conceptually cohesive — offers an illuminating way into the complexity of Book II, revealing its depth without exaggeration and its modernity without distortion.
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