Any performer of the preludes and fugues of Bach's Well-tempered Clavier faces a delicate challenge: how to make this music, originally conceived as pedagogical exercise, communicate to a modern audience as a concert-hall experience. Harpsichordist Gary Cooper's performance of the 24 preludes and fugues of the second book was the opening concert of this summer's Spitalfields Festival, and he found a compelling combination of intimacy and flamboyance. In the gloriously dilapidated glamour of Wilton's Music Hall in East London, he created a sense of communion with his audience, even thanking them for their concentration and patience at the end of the performance.
But it was Cooper's stamina that was most impressive. There is something austere about the way Bach's music is structured: there is no necessary progression that connects the opening C major prelude with the final B minor fugue, two and a half hours later. Apart from the cumulative effect of continuous counterpoint and invention, each prelude and fugue is a discrete exploration of its own tonal universe. Yet Cooper managed to create a musical journey that was more than the sum of its individual parts.
In a cluster of movements in the middle of the piece he dramatised the stylistic variety that defines Bach's music, as the frenzied energy of the E minor fugue led into the languorous, soft-focused F major prelude. The F minor pieces were even more extreme, with the violent contrasts of dynamic and expression within the prelude, and the propulsion of the fugue. He controlled the complex lines of the enormous fugues at the end of the cycle, in B flat minor and B major, giving each a sense of inevitability. However, for all his accuracy and commitment, Cooper's approach was didactic rather than fantastical, and he was concerned to reveal the inner workings of Bach's counterpoint rather than revel in his superabundant musical invention. But by the time of the final, sonorous fugue in B minor, Cooper's performance had created a mysterious momentum that seemed to flow from the very start of the cycle.
·The Spitalfields festival continues until June 25. Box office: 020-7377 1362.
