C. P. E. Bach's essay is a must for every musician. The only problem with it is, while the vast majority of the book deals with ornamentation, he says little about the other aspects of keyboard performance: phrasing, tempo, agogics and so on. So, while he is very useful in questions regarding ornamentation, he lacks sufficient information about the other equally important aspects of performance practice of his era, probably because in his time they were so universaly known and it wasn't necessary to put them down on paper.
The essay of Rosalyn Tureck is another must and it's much more practical and useful for the performer of today who wish to play Bach seriously. Her book is a graded introduction on playing Bach, with pieces of graded technical difficulty, starting at the very elementary level and going on to pieces of medium difficulty. There are very interesting introductory essays where she exposes her own view of this music and how she thinks this music could be played. However, she is not dogmatic at all. The pieces are all thoroughly phrased, with detailed indications about tempo and dynamics. The book was published in the 60's but imo the majority of what she says is perfectly valid today.
It's not possible to make a comparison between the two, because they wrote different things for different readers in different historical eras. I will say that they are both very useful.
Moreover, there are very few good books written by world famous musicians about the performance practice in the baroque era. One of them (and very similar to Tureck's) is the excellent antology by Howard Fergusson.
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Topic: An Introduction to the Performance of Bach by Rosalyn Tureck (Read 6807 times)