Emerson Quartet-Art of the Fugue 9

	Duration: 02:12 minutes Upload Time: 2007-08-20 15:50:34 User: medpiano :::: Favorites :::: Top Videos of Day
Description: The Emerson String Quartet performs Contrapunctus 9 from J.S. Bach's "Art of the Fugue." Notable in this performance is Emerson's awesome violist, Lawrence Dutton, who really shines here.
Comments
klaverfar ::: Favorites  2007-08-21 15:28:07 Best quartet-version I've heard. Wonderful. Thanks, medpiano. (Funny to think though, that this 4-part fugue in all it's apparent complexity really isn't more difficult than it can actually be played by a talented 10-year old on a piano.) __________________________________________________
onionpizza ::: Favorites  2007-08-30 13:57:43 anyone can play the notes; my synthesizer can play them quite well too. playing them right is an entirely different story. it took 64 years for bach to write this. johann christian bach, his youngest son was quite a talented musician himself yet he couldn't play this piece due to its musical complexity. heck, my 5-year old daughter can read shakespeare quite convincingly even though she has no idea what she's talking about. __________________________________________________
klaverfar ::: Favorites  2007-08-30 14:07:34 I'm not quite sure I know what you're hinting at, onionpizza: That no human being is worthy of playing Bach, whatever the age, because they are too dumb to understand it... - or that your have to reach a certain age, before you develop musicality enough to enjoy a fugue??? My son (10) loves the piece (and Bach fugues in general), enjoys immensely to follow the voices through the piece, and enhance first one, then another, while playing it. Should I tell him he's wrong and better play Für Elise? __________________________________________________
onionpizza ::: Favorites  2007-08-31 02:28:45 Tell your son to persevere BY ALL MEANS! I fell in love with Bach when I was 6 and by 10 I had the same pleasure tracking the different voices; I believe I am with him on that. Bach is one of the best things that happened to me and I hope your son says the same 40 years from now. My point ... next comment... __________________________________________________
onionpizza ::: Favorites  2007-08-31 02:37:36 My point is that the magnitude of Bach's dimension is beyond most mortals very much like Euler's papers on mathematics or Shakespeare's plays. One can read them, one can play them and one can talk about them but unless one has rewired his brain to resonate with the same sense of cosmic order that prompted those people to write what they wrote or comprehension of their work is like...like trying to shave our faces with a dull knife. __________________________________________________
onionpizza ::: Favorites  2007-08-31 02:39:32 Many talented people have spent a big chunk of their lives studying Bach like others have spent their lives studying Euler or Newton. I have spent a fair amount of energy trying to make sense of Bach's fugues. I can play many of them flawlessly, by heart, but in private I'm embarrassed to acknowledge that I'm years light from anything resembling comprehension. That's why I made the comment about playing the notes and comprehending them. Sorry for the long comment. __________________________________________________
klaverfar ::: Favorites  2007-08-31 02:57:31 Thanks, onionpizza, I appreciate your comments and can't really disagree. The unfathomable depth of these works is what makes them so exiting, so valuable and so worth studying. (And I can promise you that I will NEVER let my son give up that study... Not that I think he would ever want to: he laughs and sings from pleasure, playing these fugues). __________________________________________________
HaMoOhAhA ::: Favorites  2007-09-02 17:11:33 Do you guys ever feel like your overanalyzing his pieces. Sometimes I do. I'm not trying to provoke an argument or anything, but when I study his works and stuff, it always occurs to me that maybe Bach wrote this or that piece just for fun, like working on a difficult puzzle or something, like maybe there's no deep meaning or anything and he just decided to do it becuase he was bored. __________________________________________________
HaMoOhAhA ::: Favorites  2007-09-02 17:11:56 like, for example, I paint a picture just becuase I felt like, I die, my art is rediscovered, and then the painting is considered the greatest painting ever painted. I'm not sur if I'm being clear, but do you get my drift. __________________________________________________
klaverfar ::: Favorites  2007-09-03 05:17:14 Not so much analyzing, HaMo, as trying to capture precisely what it is that makes us return to Bach, to Picasso, to Dostoyevski. They hit something inside us - just curious to know what, why and how... Call it an intellectual quest or passtime. Not really an analysis, as I see it. __________________________________________________
medpiano ::: Favorites  2007-09-05 22:05:51 After every piece, Bach initialed the letters for "To God be the glory"--hardly the closing penstrokes of a bored man. __________________________________________________
klaverfar ::: Favorites  2007-09-06 03:09:32 But of course, HaMo could be right in the way that IF Bach was bored, he would probably react to that boredom by going to the klavier and write a fugue, instead of turning on the tv. This fugue would, if his was inspirered in that moment, then as anything by a craftsman the greatness of a Bach or a Goya or whatever, be a complex and ever inspirering masterpiece. __________________________________________________
gio333e ::: Favorites  2007-09-08 09:15:44 who is the cellist? __________________________________________________
radurak ::: Favorites  2007-11-01 06:46:44 they're really good. Love the piece and love how they play it, with fire, passion and brilliance. Until now i only heard it on piano, but this instantly convinced me, among other transcriptions for trumpets and horns etc. :) __________________________________________________
gunmenow ::: Favorites  2007-11-02 17:04:58 please keep uploading!!!! the rest of the work __________________________________________________