Rosalyn Tureck - J.S.Bach: Well tempered clavier
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2025
- Very interesting story Roslyn Tureck! Here she talks about Bach's famous works as a great inspiration for all other composers throughout music history - twelve-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg, traces in the works of Chopin, Mendelsohn and others ...
Great ✨ Rosalyn Tureck ✨
Thanks to whoever
published this video.
How can you not love everything about this video. Thanks for sharing.
What a great musician is Rosalyn Tureck. To bring Bach to life like this. Incredible
On the other hand, her Chopin sucks quite a bit....
@@daniele8716Do you mean on the piano or the polymoog or both?
I was lucky to hear her live in Toronto two or three times. I used to listen to Tureck when i was studying Bach. Gould respected Tureck and rightly so! Anything that she did made eminent sense. We should be grateful for Rosalyn Tureck's legacy.
I grew up listening to Roslyn Tureck Decca recordings. I learned to love Bach because of Tureck. Thanks for the posting.
She stunned with the synth
What an astonishingly insightful and forward thinking lady. It isn't often you can find accomplished classical musicians willing to experiment with synthesizers. The Polymoog would place this sometime in the mid to late 70's. It was a fairly advanced analog synth, but sadly someone should have programmed a more pleasing patch for her. It didn't have to sound like an early 1960's combo organ! Still, it helped to make her point about the universality of Bach's music.
Wow. Glad I found this.. thanks for uploading
Wonderful musician...
One can see why Glenn Gould admired Tureck so much. She was certainly a great Bach player and thinker. She set a standard of Bach playing which was unmatched for its time period.
I knew someone who studied with her and he said she was very quirky. I can see that. Her affectations and manner in her speaking could be satirized on Saturday Night Live! 😂😂. But I sincerely have the utmost respect for her towering stature as an artist.
I can’t tell if Tureck is a genius, or a brilliant and disciplined scholar. Either way, she’s absolutely incredible.
Given she created a style of playing Bach like no other, and was Glenn Gould's only influence ( according to him), I'd say she's a genius. Scholars aren't necessarily even good players nor necessarily talented musicians. Some are blatantly bad. .
the cultured accent of this lady ,her head bursting with knowledge and fingers trained to perfection and all died with her , to achieve her level of musician ship is so rare
Gosh this lady was a treasure.
Great, great, great woman....she understood how it works. Thanks, Rosalyn!!!
Well, I don't care if some feel offended by that, but she confirmed (again) the idea I already had for decades now, that is that Bach "simply" is the greatest wonder that music has ever seen (dixit Wagner) and the greatest among the greats.
For those angry because of Chopin comparisons, you are simultaneous right and wrong. Right when you say the the fact Chopin is a piano composer doesn't make him inferior. Wrong when you say that Rosalyn is implying that. She just said that while Bach music is somehow independent of the instrument (which can be said of many other baroque composers, and even more of renaissance composers), Chopin music is totally dependent of the characteristics and idiosyncrasy of the piano (which is true).
BTW, when she pays other pieces to show that Bach can sound like Mendelssohn, Debussy and Stravinsky, I can't hear anyone/anything else but Bach... always and unmistakably Bach. Always different, but always Bach.
+Fernando Manuel Rodrigues In fact, also the Bach fugue sounds extremely ugly on the moog...
This is true. Rosalyn Tureck just says that Chopin's music sounds wrong on other instrument than the piano, while Bach's music is incredibly "sound proof". It can sound good played on almost any instrument.
Chopin's music is dedicated for piano, it brings the best from the piano and we heard so much incredible pianists playing it that they raised the bar so high that we do not want to hear some less good interpretation of Chopin. I would even go so far to say that Chopin's music is so perfected (perfectly composed plus perfectly interpreted) that you can only make it worse if you start to change things and play with it. People do not know how incredibly good, thoughtful and emotional are the best interpretations of Chopin's music. And that is the reason why pianist love his music so much ... and that love is the reason why such good interpretations of his music exist. Thus, it is a closed circle, a positive feedback, like many things on this word :)
And it is known fact that Chopin loved Bach's music and I'm sure that Bach would love Chopin's music also. At the first look, their music might look very different but there is a single very important connection between them and that is musical harmony. In their music, musical harmony (chord progressions, modulations etc.) is very important and incredibly rich and perfected. And that is the reason why I love them both.
The *sound* is undeniably ugly, but somehow the *music* survives it, since it transcends the medium to which it was assigned. Chopin's music - despite his genius - does not, since it is so closely bound up with the medium it was written for.
Bach > any composer
The fact that Chopin's pieces are specifically written for the piano does NOT necessarily mean he couldn't write otherwise but that he CHOSE to make the most of the possibilities of the newly conceived piano fortes. While I am a huge fan of Bach, as any music lover with... ears really ought to, I find this little woman utterly pretentious
Hahahaha, I nearly spat my cornflakes everywhere when she started playing the polymoog
I nearly sizzled my sausage.
Playing the moog was the whole point of her argument
I nearly shat my cornhole
hahahahahahahaaha yeah! 😂😂
.... Chopin nocturne, omg
In spite of all the somewhat justified comments here, particularly about the Poly Moog, sounding like a nervous Calliope,... I still love Rosalyn Tureck's amazing understanding of music , and her astounding virtuosity. She played both piano and harpsichord astonishingly well, ( not common in the 1950's) and her performance career lasted over 50 years. Always a great champion of great music!
I certainly agree with Ms Tureck that Bach works really well with the modern electronic keyboard!
I always knew i loved Roselyn Tureck!!!! And now i have a better idea why!!! What an astonishing insight she has into Bach, modern physics, and spirituality. She really understood what a Universal Genius Bach was. Chopin was abrilliant composer, and nonetheless her points about the quality of Bach's music that transcends the instrument that it is played on are very well taken. Was this film made in the early 70's?
Fantastic. Just wished she had explored the Beethoven-ness of Bach´s Partitas 4,5,6, for solo keyboard, which I swore were Beethoven on first encountering them.
Shes just the best!!!
If only they made "Bach's Adventure" for the NES.
Awesome!
I was so suprised to see the Moog! To be honest, though, she could've used any electronic organ - the sound she's chosen is just as simple as anything out of a Vox or Farfisa transistor organ (with their tremelo & percussion switched off). The Moog is capable of sounds that are a lot more shaped - both in timbre and in amplitude.
I love this/her.
She's heavenly.
Isn't there other videos of this kind (or more parts of this one if it's longer)??? This is just amazing and would love to see and listen more of the great knowledge of Tureck...
Type Rosalyn Tureck playlists.
Ok, thanks!
Yeah my thoughts exactly!
this video is comedy gold
This made me chuckle.
It would be better if the thumbnail wasn't the Polymoog but her. Seeing the Polymoog up front kind of ruins the surprise. :)
Agreed! ;-)
@marcxopoco That is the point she was making. That Chopin's composing style was meant solely for the piano and the way he wrote his music makes it difficult to transcribe on to other instruments. It was based on piano sonority, rather than abstract organization.
That holds for ANY composer after the Baroque era, until the advent of modernism (Beethoven included, who was a great piano nut too). This is mainly due to the fact that instruments were given much more attention and they were built with increasing craftsmanship. Brahms is very 'organizational' and structure-based, but his sonorities are nonetheless strictly dependent on the instruments he chose when composing the pieces. Try to transcribe an Intermezzo for piano and make an orchestral piece out of it: it would be a complete failure! Debussy was known for his maniacal attitude towards abstract structure, but also very specific about instrumentation. There is nothing intrinsically bad (or good) with that, as Tureck wrongly implies.
I feel much intellectual arrogance both in the comments here and in the video. That said, Tureck was a great Bach interpreter (but a rather unpleseant and ideological human being). I tend to dissociate the interpreter from the person.
Hey I played that fugue not to long ago on my channel and had no idea it was so complex
@rizz7604 I think you missed her point. She wasn't necessarily bashing Chopin and saying he wasn't a great composer. She just said that he composed in a different style and thought more of sonority rather than organization.
I'd say that Chopin thought of sonority *as well as* organisation. There's no lack of the latter in his music.
Love this piece, attempted it long time ago. Chromatic, but still diatonic, not atonal.
when she started playing
chopin on the moog esp. the first few bars sounded like carnival music of the cheapest variety. point taken.
8:04 - J. S. Bach: Prelude and Fugue No. 20 in A Minor, BWV 889
and I got the point about Bach composing more in an organizational sense than Chopin. That makes perfect sense to me. It's just that the tone in which the information was delivered seems to imply a supposed hierarchy amongst composers that I think is completely unnecessary. It certainly doesn't enhance my love or understanding of music to hear someone imply that one composer is "greater" than another due sheerly to differing styles...but. Just my opinion. Worth roughly 2 cents.
wow, she was totally nuts, and that;s what makes her playing so interesting.
While I can't agree to all the points made by madame Tureck, I surrender to her incredible genius, one of the very few top interpreters of Bach of all time. Her chopin, incidentally, was of unparalleled beauty, not at all inferior to the other grand madame of piano, Rosina Lhevinne. Both these ladies were the principal teachers at Juilliard of my piano professor Richard Syracuse whom i was lucky to have as a teacher at Ohio University along with another great pianist and pedagogue , Gail Berenson.
gain so much from Master Tureck
to have a subject in 12 tones, already at the end of an age
the sound of the instrument is like a video game soundtrack
"Chopin was not capable of writing that kind of abstract music." That is such an ignorant statement. Of course Chopins compositions don't work on a synthesizer, because piano-music requires a sustain-pedal to be played properly. Chopin was aware of that. He would've composed differently, if he had been a guitarist for example. On the other hand: Every baroque-composition works on a synthesizer; just because of the contrapuntal structure of the music. What Tureck describes doesn't only apply to the works of Bach.
Well, she just admires much more Bach than she admires Chopin. Simple as that. I do too. Nothing wrong with that. It is easily provable, as she does here, that Bach is so much more universal than Chopin.
But both Bach and Chopin exist. You don't have to choose between them!
Listen to the Etude Op.10 No.6 There you will hear Bach in Chopin.
Its a piece every bit as profound and great as anything by Bach.Composed when Chopin was all of 20 years old.
@annarosian I guess you didn't understand what she was explaining about structure in Bach's music? Oh and, it's a very early Moog.. hardly 'toy organ'
@annarosian I guess you didn't understand what she was explaining about structure in Bach's music?
Pretty much exactly why I became an amateur pianist and not a music major.
Fascinating and instructive. But please keep the 'polymoog' as far away as possible!
The definition of a lady - someone who can play Polymoog but doesn't....
Reclaiming the right for DYNAMIC VARIETY is a must for every performer of J.S.Bach’s music. And, the demonstrated signed by J.S.Bach receipt for selling pianoEforte and thus, using it and composing for it, proves that his keyboard music may not be limited dynamically, as if it was intended only for harpsichord. What a significant FACT to be known by all pianists today! And many other compositional details prove this as well.
However, despite my admiration to Rosalyn Tureck for this daring announcement, the question remains: Why the included performance significantly lacks dynamic variety that piano affords to his music, according to this evident proclamation, remains a mystery? Is it unintended and simply due to some nervousness? Or, is it an evident blind spot? It simply shows that in addition to the intellectual understanding, one has to commit to rebelling against the holding power of both the absurd convention and the false habit. And, this ability of J.S.Bach to help us grasp the blind spots and to increase our level of clarity, is the most invaluable impact of his amazing music that can be achieved only, if his music is performed as intended - in emotionally engaging way.
Woah, had I known that people would be responding to my comments YEARS LATER, I probably wouldn't have said anything at all...all I have to say at this point is that Chopin certainly doesn't need my defense and that I actually like that Gould quote. Enough.
Inasmuch as Bach's music forms the foundation for all of western music, it only makes sense that all of western music - is based on Bach.
I don't think that Chopin was incapable of composing "abstract music". It just wasn't his intention. In fact the baroque method of composing itself with it's counterpoint leads to abstract music, that can be played on all kinds of instruments. Therefore what she said about Bach is also true for most baroque composers.
The moog has no pedal.
The moog makes the left hand accompaniment as loud as the melody.
So the playing of the Chopin Nocturne on the moog makes the player incompetent both in the balance of melody and accompaniment and in sustaining the bass notes.
Even if there was a sustain pedal there are no dynamics on the moog so it would sound like a hot mess. Try it with any nocturne by Chopin on a keyboard and you will see what I mean
What are the Stravinskian elements in the a-moll fugue of the Book 2?
I really don't know.
She also taught Sharon Isbin to interpret Bachs' Lute suites. An embellishment nightmare!
What is the Chopin excerpt, can any body tell me? Thanks in advance, and for the clip!
totalspa 4:07 or thereabouts
Jacob Moses Thanks Jacob, but the name of the piece it's from..?
Does anybody know where this excerpt comes from? Thanks a lot!
Roz as the busker on the moog ...or as the witch in the Wiz of OZ
Where is the clip of this program where she plays BWV 853 on clavichord? I had it saved to favorites years ago and it had been removed 😡
A brilliant and very moving performance it was.
You still complain about the polymoog after 8:03? Try a different style of music then because if you don't like this then you don't like Bach. I can't think of a composition that better exhibits Bach's personality, development, method, craft, etc.
dude. you are defending chopin against bach... man nobody knows what universal means but glenn gould might help: "The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." chopin is the master of releasing floral and happy endorphins in music, and bach was able to completely abandon them and compose fugues to find beauty in each note whether you are happy or angry or sad.
She herself was way ahead of her time. Those that laugh at the PolyMoog playing, I guess you don't get the point ;) I don't believe she thinks the synth sounds that great, but she's a bright person making a compelling point. To be honest, Gould was a faster and male version of her and her playing and musical view. Except, Gould transcended this at the end of his life, his second recording of the Goldbergs is transcendent.
Saying someone is "not capable of composing abstract" music constitutes a bash. Bach is my favorite composer ever, but it's clear that he can't compose something like the "Ocean Etude". Chopin, in fact, is a terrible example for this kind of facile comparison, since he is (amongst the Romantics) almost as singularly concerned with harmonic detail as Bach; his preludes are an obvious elaboration of Bach's own inventiveness in preludes (no. 1 in particular); he composed high-art dance forms. &c
Ocean etude is not covering any new grounds, go look at Chromatic Fantasia if you think that etude is crazy. It's a beautiful piece for the first 10 seconds and then Chopin runs out of ideas to develop it properly.
That "Bach vs Chopin" thing seems to be, in fact, some sort of "voice vs percussion" problem. Can we say that, in a way, Chopin "went too percussive" with the piano?
I think she's demonstrating that Chopin's music is utterly medium-specific, unlike Bach's.
OK ready? I'm going to start a debate with ridiculous Rosalyn Tureck fanboys/fangirls out there...how does Chopin's piano-specific writing make him any less of a composer than Bach? Because he actually employed the pedal, does that make him inferior???! A piece's inherent ability to be played on a goofy moog (I love moogs, but I don't care for the cheesy sound this one produces) does not indicate that it is superior to a piece composed for a specific instrument...
reading you destroying an argument no one else but you put forward. this practice is called the straw-man fallacy in critical thinking argot. you also wasted valuable wave-length that may have been used more fruitful in other, perhaps, more profitable ways. this is not soccer to team up, btw.
Qué grossa
What she plays? plz reply bwv number
Define "universal."
!
!
!
I always thought Bach's music sounded better on modern instruments, but this is rediculous...
As a lover of most of Bach's music, I am indeed grateful that he did NOT compose more pieces that sound like the first one she plays here. IMO, that piece demonstrates how the 12-tone mode can make even the music of a master like Bach sound ugly.
This is not an ugly piece, it is actually incredibly powerful. Maybe you haven't put enough into it, or maybe we just have different taste.
It's a beautiful piece but imo, there isn't an instrument that has met its standards yet. You must be able to sustain some of these notes like a Moog but have distinct timbre to distinguish the timbres.
To draw the ire of youtube users, clearly.
And the Polymoog sounds horrible. Whomever programmed it has no taste at all.
The PolyMoog in this case sounds pretty bad,...(especially with the expected YT snark escalating comment by comment),... WHY? 1st those are single oscillator square waves, secondly reproduced inadequately,... She probably special ordered it from Moog, ( back when this was a completely new thing) long before all the rest of us, have gotten used to hearing every cheap home computer game using square waves (1980's) for the accompanying , music sound track... So for Rosalyn it represented avante garde! because You guys here have little understanding of how twentieth century music evolved , along with the "NEW FREEDOM" enabled by 'electronic synthesis" of new sonorities free from the constraints of "tired old" acoustic instruments. As the pendulum swings, so it goes.... but She is hardly brain damaged... although out of context , it is now difficult to understand her comments about "abstract" art versus Chopin's music tied to a particular instrument.
And I would add, No taste at all at all, as we Irishmen say.
Well bach was better then Chopin usually...
Aha I know, WTC1 fugue in b
Terrible. Like the sound for a gothic movie. 4:00 HA! A piano at last!
@rizz7604 I don't think any of that has any importance on the music.
@OriginalBasaliskos Hhhhhmmm....nice defense, but the contemptuous tone with which she delivers the line "you see, Chopin was 'not capable' of writing that kind of 'abstract' music" seems a bit overbearing to me and betrays a bit of...well...presumptuousness? How exactly would she know for a fact that Chopin was 'not capable' of this? Perhaps he chose a different path from Bach voluntarily...the term 'not capable' implies inferiority, and that seems painfully obvious to me watching this...
Love the chopin bashing!
That ridiculous "avant-garde" synthesiser is a complete musical disaster. If there is anything that can be salvaged, it is comedy.
jeez man u think you'd be pleased to know that your defense of chopin was voted up to one of the top comments, why so grouchy? Lol
That is the most pretentious accent I've heard in half a lifetime!
"The realm of atonal music?" Bach is to Schoenberg as prose is to ungrammatical nonsense.
Bach works on anything. How do you compare Chopin, Polish people pardon me,..the most shallow of all, how do you compare anyone, to Bach!?
Chopin couldnt compose abstract music! what IS she talking about? Just because it sounds horrible on that ghastly organ she's got there! Sacrilege!
The sound of this electric piano is horrible !
Fine, but why does she play that weird and horrible sounding toy organ?
why is she playing on this horrible moog?!
she is not capable to explain her thoughts without it
She is a disciple of Schonberg and his atonal crap.
Good for her.
The playing of the A minor fugue is too slow.
What horrible keyboard is she using ??
It's a polymoog which is actually a classic bit of kit. if you had one today you could sell it and buy a top of the line digital piano without loss.
It's horrible beyond belief, indeed
I certainly agree with Ms Tureck that Bach works really well with the modern electronic keyboard!
Bach works really well with every instrument.