about this recording:
In as far as they are not lying undiscovered in some Central-German library, Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard works have been carefully edited and are available on a vast number of recordings. Therefore, it may come as a surprise that hitherto only the second version, in B minor, of the Overture in the French Manner BWV 831 has been recorded, but not the original version in C minor (BWV 831a). The present recording is the first time the latter has been released on CD.

The 1914 Grotrian-Steinweg grand piano that Frederick Blum used for this recording was tuned according to the instructions of the Bach pupil Johann Philipp Kirnberger as a result, the keys selected by Bach are able to unfold their distinctive tone colors.

For Robert Schumann, Johann Sebastian Bach was the ultimate authority for all music, and simultaneously the “daily bread,” as stated in Schumann’s “Musical House Rules and Maxims.” Schumann played from the Well-tempered Clavier every day – it was an indispensable source of inspiration for him. This influence shines through again and again also in the Intermezzi op.4, for example, in the canonic structure right at the beginning of the first Intermezzo. Psychologically, however, the Intermezzi lead into a completely different world, a world far less firmly established than the musical cosmos of the Baroque period: Schumann’s music develops in the medium of Romantic irony, in a world full of masquerades and ambiguous confessions of the soul.