Rethinking the Well-Tempered Keyboard

The pianists call the Bach collection Das Wohltemperierte Clavier their bible. Or should we assume that this music actually hides a coded message concerning the story of Salvation professed by the composer? The answer to this question can be given by the presentation at NFM of an unusual project by Natalya Pasichnyk and the vocal ensemble Calmus Ensemble.

Each concert event, including Bach's preludes and fugues in its program, is a musical celebration, albeit a local one. However, the project of Swedish-Ukrainian pianist Natalya Pasichnyk Rethinking the Well-Tempered Clavier is much more. On the album released in 2024, the keyboard miniatures are accompanied by a vocal ensemble that accompanies the artist (rather not the other way around), singing poetic and biblical texts. They were taken from cantatas and oratorios of the cantor or from the Protestant chant itself. As Pasichnyk explains, the final form of the narrative was to be not just an ordinary gospel story, but her personal “treatise” on the meaning of each of us's life.

The pianist was inspired by the theory of Ukrainian musicologist of Polish origin, Bolesław Jaworski, who argued that the intricacies of each prelude and fugue from the legendary Bach collection are based on the melodic and harmonic skeleton of the Lutheran chant. Piano works would therefore have their theological significance. Imitating this way of thinking and searching for these meanings, Pasichnyk arranged forty-eight passages into eight “chapters”, dealing, among others, with Christmas and Pentecost. “If Bach's faith created this music, I hope it can also give birth to faith — a faith that we need more than ever in our time,” she explains of her extraordinary endeavour.