http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/arts/music/pierre-laurent-aimard-plays-bach-at-carnegie-hall.html 2014-11-14 23:50:28 Pierre-Laurent Aimard Plays Bach at Carnegie Hall Pierre-Laurent Aimard played Book I of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” at Carnegie Hall on Thursday. === Like most pianists, Since then, though, he has been playing and recording everything, even the Beethoven piano concertos. And Bach. In 2008 his Deutsche Grammophon recording of Mr. Aimard, 57, is in the midst of an international tour playing Book I of this work. On Thursday at Carnegie Hall, he gave probing, austerely beautiful accounts of the 24 Preludes and Fugues of Book I, nearly two hours of intellectually formidable music, for a sizable audience. To prepare, Mr. Aimard spent a seven-month sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, an experience he has talked about From the chatter at intermission, it was clear that many Bach fans in the audience had heard the pianist Andras Schiff’s two recitals in fall 2012 at the 92nd Street Y, when In the familiar Prelude in C, which opens Book I, Mr. Aimard played with rippling grace, using ample pedal and allowing the sonorities to mingle. In the Fugue in C, paired with the prelude, he laid out the theme (the subject, in fugue terminology) with reserved but sensitive directness. This performance set the tone for Mr. Aimard’s overall approach. These works are astonishing achievements in the physics of music. Yet simultaneously, as a complex fugue evolves — for example, the long four-voiced Fugue in A minor — Bach turns this rigorous genre into a profound emotional journey. For some tastes, Mr. Aimard’s playing might have been a little too concerned with the physics of the music. At times his sound was dry and his articulation a little pointed. I was fascinated by the way his ear, so attuned to contemporary music, could search out the pathbreaking aspects in the pieces, like Bach’s forays into wayward chromatic harmony, and his penchant for skittish fugue themes that hint of the pointillist writing of Schoenberg. Mr. Aimard had fun with the pieces as well, as in the Prelude in D, with its spiraling stream of 16th-notes in the right hand, and the Prelude in B flat, which came off like an impish, quasi-improvised toccata. At the end, after the quietly monumental Prelude and Fugue in B minor, the audience remained silent for a spell, letting the experience sink in, and only then broke into a rousing ovation.