
This is part of a project to record all 48 preludes & fugues on my Bechstein, with a scrolling score for study purposes. You will find some amusing lyrics that fit the fugue subject at http://msteer.co.uk/creative/bach48ly... (a homage to Ebenezer Prout qv). I bought my Peters Edition in 1962 (in places it's not identical to the 19thC french edition used for the scroling score) To me these pieces are one of the great sacred texts of music, and every year I have played throu them as a form of musical meditation. In 2008 I thought I should really learn & record them properly. At that point I realised how little I really knew them, and fitting in the learning process amid the various distractions of which a life consists has taken a ridiculous amount of time. Even so, as you will hear at certain points, alas I was not immune to foolish errors when I sat down to record. I started recording them individually, alone, but found the battle to get the notes right destroyed my sense of 'meditativity', and thus was false to the spirit of the music as I sought to convey it. These first 12 preludes & fugues were recorded in the presence of friends in September 2010. Having spent a lifetime thinking about these pieces, I believe they work bettter as a sequence if the minor piece in each key precedes the major, rather than the printed order. NB to YouTube: this is public domain, NOT copyright material