Wolfgang Rubsam Inventions and Sinfonias

[kolmogorov]

Have you listen to his recordings of Inventions and Sinfonias?

He is very provocative! He changes rythms as he wants , and tries to show the melodic side of these works .

There is a trick he uses a lot, I think it works for some pieces but not for others. He makes longer the first note in each bar . It is a kind of rubato, since he accelerates after then to recover the tempo.  When you hear it the first time , it sounds weird (we are used to hear metronomically "perfect" Bach versions).

But if you hear these works as if you did not never heard them before, some performances are really beautiful, in my opinion. But you have to forget the score, any version you have already heard, everything. Just as if they were new pieces of a unknown composer.

When I was studying Sinfonia nº2 , I heard Rubsam performance and some others with my teacher, and without knowing their names before, he pointed to Gould and Rubsam as the ones he prefered. He did not like other versions as much because being uninteresting. I was surprised, because Rubsam version of sinfonia 2 does not "respect the score" (he uses the trick I described before).

You can hear one minute of each piece at Amazon. I really recommend to anyone studying inventions (but do not try to imitate him!).

However, I thank Naxos to dare to publish this CD.

Javier

[pianowolfi]

We recently had a thread about this:
https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,20438.0.html

maybe that's helpful

[arensky]

I bought the Naxos CD of the Toccatas about ten years ago. It became a drink coaster. 

But I kept the jewel case, it now contains a Jimmy Dorsey CD.

I don't think you can take the rhythmic energy out of Bach or any baroque music and have it remain interesting or coherent. Even in the slow movements/sections there has to be a basic tempo, something that Rubsam either will or cannot do. While it's true that there's a lot more to Baroque performance practice and style than modern pianists currently embrace or engage in especially concerning rhthym reading and interpretation I found Mr. Rubsam's interpretation excessive, and technically incompetent; his tone was unfocused and there was absolutely no rhythmic pulse to hold the music together, it was just random notes. This is not the correct way to interpret any music, let alone Bach. There are many other pianists capable of playing the works competently, imo this was a
bad move (they've made a few) on Naxos' part.

[landru]

Wow! This was like listening to Bach on a roller coaster! But I love listening to other people's ideas on how to interpret music. This rhythymic extreme I may not like or want to emulate - but it does sound like he is in control of it and has a vision of what he wants to do with the music. At some points I was wondering "where is that in the music?" and it wasn't always a bad thing (though sometimes I was cringing) in that it illuminated something I hadn't noticed before.