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As long as we\\u2019re conducting experiments on the familiar C major prelude\\u2026

Some years ago, Don and I heard Angela Hewitt play a marvelous concert of Bach and Messiaen. (There\\u2019s a combination!) She gave the most unusual performance of the C major prelude I\\u2019ve ever heard: very fast, very light, either a bit of pedal or just a superhuman legato (don\\u2019t remember which), and certain notes voiced to give the rapid running pattern some shape. It was almost impressionistic.

Now if there\\u2019s a right way to play this prelude, this is definitely not it. But it was really quite a marvelous treat to hear something so familiar in such a surprising new guise; if it wasn\\u2019t \\u201cright,\\u201d it sure was good!

Here is an imitation \\u2014 a rather poor one, I\\u2019m afraid \\u2014 of my memory of that performance:

\\nJohann Sebastian Bach\\n
\\nThe Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Prelude 1 (in C major) \\xe0 la Hewitt\\n
\\nPaul Cantrell,\\npiano\\n
\\n\\u266b\\nDownload\\n(1:23 / 2.1 M)\\n

Don and I both immediately ran off to get her recording of it, and were immediately disappointed: she played the piece in a completely ordinary way. It was fine; it just wasn\\u2019t at all the daring version we\\u2019d heard live. I came up with two theories about this:

\\n
• She came up with the novel interpretation in the few years between the recording and the concert, or
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• afraid of critical reaction, she played it safe on the recording and left the risk-taking for the live performances.
\\n

I don\\u2019t know if the second theory was true here, but it\\u2019s definitely true in general: musicians don\\u2019t want to give critics anything to criticize, and thus focus first \\u2014 particularly on recordings \\u2014 on having no mistakes, no risks, nothing extreme, nothing wrong. The result of this is the current glut of recordings that are perfect but not very good.

To heck with that! Give me risk-taking! I\\u2019d rather hear performances that miss the mark half the time than the bland, play-it-safe perfectionism we usually get.