Bach music

[softbn]

Hello. Since Bach didn’t play the piano but organ, which has no dynamics - when playing Bach on the piano - should the left hand be as loud as the right hand - imitating the organ ?

[brogers70]

If you want to play the organ, play the organ. If you want to play the harpsichord, play the harpsichord. Do you think Bach instructed his string players or his singers not to shape their phrases dynamically because you could not do that on the organ or the harpsichord? From the time of Bach onward people adapted his music to the tastes and capabilities of their own times (Czerny altered the written notes, Mozart rescored Handel, so I doubt he tried to make his pianoforte sound like a harpsichord when he played Bach, Busoni made huge Romantic piano arrangements of Bach pieces, Mendelssohn rewrote some of the harmonies in the St Matthew Passion to suit his taste, you can hear well-known pianistic Bach specialists like Roselyn Turek, strongly emphasizing the entrance of each voice in a fugue). It was only in the mid-20th century that people started trying to imitate the way they thought Bach would have sounded in Bach's own time. Many of those performances are beautiful and interesting, but I think if you are going down the road of historical authenticity, you shouldn't be playing Bach on the piano at all.