Piotr Anderszewski plays Bach

Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is the Old Testament of music, a work that summarizes and synthesizes three centuries of musical creation, and against which the entire musical production of the following three centuries can be measured. It is the eternal source to which artists from the most divergent eras and genres refer. 

To Mozart, Bach appeared as the embodiment of a scholastic ideal from which he drew inspiration in the fugues of his Masses and Motets. For Mendelssohn, he represented the ultimate perfection of musical architecture. The neo-classicals saw in him the supreme manifestation of precision in the expression of thought. What attracted the serialists of the 50s and 60s to Bach were the subtleties of fragmentation, while what interests jazz and rock musicians is the perpetual pulsation of a relentless ostinato.

Two books of 24 Preludes and Fugues each, in all keys, constitute The Well-Tempered Clavier. For this film, Piotr Anderszewski has selected twelve of the most significant from Book II.