BACH: The Well-Tempered Clavier. Joao Carlos Martins,...

BACH: The Well-Tempered Clavier. Joao Carlos Martins, piano. Tomato 2699132. Martins focuses the listener’s attention not on Bach’s music, but on his own manner of playing it. He uses a whole range of rhetorical devices for expressive purposes, everything from unwritten rubatos and accents to gratuitous colorings and fussy articulations. Though occasionally he offers a straightforward reading by way of contrast, he often backs off even further, draining the music of all inflection and emotion and turning innocent counterpoint into stark mathematical formula. In giving many of these pieces a strongly pianistic and melodic cast, he obscures their multiple-voiced complexities. Martins’s noodling may rarely bore, but it does seem arbitrary, and what Bach wrote is vastly more interesting.