It's the place we like as much as the music. It's me who decides what the best option is on the dates available and if the Art of Fugue is not the most inviting thing Bach ever wrote, at least it's Bach. One instinctively knows that the Wigmore Hall is right, there's almost nowhere else one would rather be and they don't let you in if you don't know your Pergolesi from your Buxtehude.Fretwork founder, Richard Boothby, has completed The Art of Fugue which Bach left apparently unfinished, maybe as an exercise for others to finish, maybe in a post-modern way before the fact but it does now seem unlikely that he had just re-introduced the B-A-C-H theme and then died. Richard's study only sees fit to add no more than two minutes.
One knows what one's in for from the start with four parts introducing themselves one after the other with the main theme that is going to become very familar during the next hour. It is an exercise but an epic and labyrynthine one - reggae would call it a version excursion - the variations not mixing it up the way that Brahms on a theme of Handel or Beethoven's Diabelli do. It is academic stuff but benefits greatly from the five-part viol ensemble arrangement compared to the organ disc that I don't always see through to the end. Fretwork's tone is a pleasure in itself and seeing it played adds considerably to merely hearing it. Contrapunctus IX comes eventually to liven it up after the rich melancholy of eight mostly decorous and leisurely movements as if J.S. came back to it from arranging some Vivaldi- but, no, that is not a serious scholarly suggestion.
But it is an intricately woven canvas to explore like a maze Goldberg variations or the high point of such extended exercises, The Well-Tempered Klavier. And thank you kindly, the Wigmore and the BBC, for the bargain it is to sit in such a seat, over to the side but well upfront and right behind Ian Skelly (deputising for the indisposed Sara Mohr-Pietsch) as he addresses the choicest of radio audiences, where it would cost twice as much to sit in the evening to listen to, say, Andras Schiff.
rather then the more expansive
We aren't going to forget what B-A-C-H sounds like in a hurry but I doubt if any performance of it would make it more profound, and palatable, than Fretwork and, as Ian's notes said as I read them over his shoulder, he guaranteed that you won't have heard that music (that last couple of minutes) before. As such, Richard Boothby is to Bach what Mike Yarwood was to Denis Healey, saying things he never said but saying them just like he would have done if he had. Whether that was a more historic moment than an Electric Warrior t-shirt being worn in the Wigmore Hall is a point that might remain moot for some time.