Bach: Die Kunst der Fuge (the Art of Fugue), Bwv 1080

The 1993 Sibelius Academy Recital, Helsinki Possibly Tatyana Nikolayeva’s final live recital recording!

One of the greatest Bach players of her generation, Russian pianist Tatyana Nikolayeva delivers this incredible live performance just a few months before her death. This recording will be published for the first time on FHR, with the kind permission of the Tatyana Nikolayeva estate. This is one of the last recordings of Nikolayeva. Although the Art of Fugue work was long thought to have been written on Bach’s deathbed, recent research has shown that he was working on it during the early 1740s. The autograph from this time comprises fourteen movements (twelve fugues and two canons), but at the end of his life Bach revised the unpublished work adding two fugues and two canons. Engraving of the plates for publication began during the last months of Bach’s life and he was able to proofread some of them albeit with failing eyesight. However, when the work was published at the end of 1751 Bach was already dead and the last fugue left incomplete. In creating his The Art of Fugue Bach proved that he was master of the form but in the hands of a musically intuitive interpreter such as Tatyana Nikolayeva it becomes one of the masterpieces of a world genius.