Edward Aldwell

Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II

About this Album

American pianist Edward Aldwell (1938–2006) was well-known as both a scholar and performer of Bach and drew a significant following for his recitals in New York and around the country. A San Francisco recital featuring the Goldberg Variations was hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “not only a charm, but a sensation. No one who heard him will ever forget it.”

Likewise, his 1989 recording of Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier garnered high praise from musicians, scholars, and critics alike. “Aldwell’s performances are an outstanding demonstration of the operation of instinct and insight, imagination and understanding”, wrote Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe. And Tim Page, writing in Music International, remarked: “Aldwell plays Bach as if caught in a meticulously structured reverie, with an exquisite balance of poetry and control. One is reminded of the great Bach pianists of the past … some of the detached clarity of Glenn Gould, the fantasy of Edwin Fischer, the lustrous tone of Wilhelm Kempff, and, most important, something of his own.”

Aldwell also served as program annotator for this recording, providing commentary on each prelude and fugue. In sum, Aldwell remarked: “The range of moods encompassed by this single volume is almost without parallel in the entire literature.”