MUSICAL MUSINGS

By Irina Kuzminsky

Istill remember the first time I got to experience a clavichord. It was at the private home of a lady my piano professor and I were visiting in the hope of obtaining a sponsorship for the Conservatorium. And there it was, so small and intimate, standing modestly in a back room and not taking up much space at all. Not much aural space either, as I was soon to discover. I was invited to play it. Of course Bach came to my mind straightaway. After all, the clavichord was Bach’s favourite keyboard instrument for its expressive capabilities as compared to the harpsichord. I remember being shocked initially by how, well, quiet it was. A small unintrusive instrument with a small unintrusive sound. It made you really listen. Perfect for introspection and deep listening into the music. I realized this as I played my way ‘into’ the instrument, and began to hear and better differentiate its subtle nuances of volume and colour and touch. And now years later I come across this new album by András Schiff, released January 27, 2023, in which Schiff returns to Bach and specifically to Bach on the clavichord. The album was recorded in Bonn in the Beethoven-Haus, on a replica of a Specken clavichord from 1743 built by Boris Potvlieghe in 2003.

The bulk of the album is made up of the Inventions and Sinfonias, but the opening number is the relatively little played Capriccio in B flat major ‘on the Departure of his Beloved Brother’ (BWV 992). A solitary example of programmatic music painting by Bach (still a teenager at the time he wrote it), it comprises six movements and includes a friends’ lament, a semi-improvisational section, the joyous arrival of the postal