Piano Forum

Hello!

I have the urtext (Henle Verlag) edition of Bach's inventions/simfonias.  I read this as I listen to recordings to see how various pianists play the pieces.  Strangely, though, a lot of the players skip 90% of the ornamentations in this piece, which I find strange.  Bach intended for them to be here - why not play them?  It's a very baroque addition and I feel the piece sounds incomplete without them.  I understand each pianist gives his or her own 'spice' to the piece (like Glenn Gould playing the piece too fast and not playing the long trills in the bars halfway through the piece...), but I wish more people would include them in their performances.

Also, an even bigger problem is that every recording that does play the trills plays them differently than I'm used to.  For example, there's a trill on a quarter note at the beginning of a piece, on an F#.  A trill is supposed to start above the target note, so in this case it should start on G.  However, everybody plays the trill on F#.  Why is this acceptable?  Is it because the trill is not several measures long, therefore it's more acceptable to treat it differently?

I've also seen somebody here ask about the long trills in this piece, and there was an image in it saying that, for the long trills later in the piece, you can start on the target note instead of starting a step above it.

I ask because I'm trying to understand how to play the trills and mordants correctly in this piece... but every recording seems to play the ornamentations differently from how I've always been taught them.  So it almost seems like I have to decide for myself how to play each individual ornament, and if they're trills, whether or not I should play them on the starting note!

Sorry for such a long post, but this is really confusing me!  I always thought I understood trills until this piece confused me..