Prelude & Fugue No. 22 in B-Flat Minor

The Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Minor seem to share a similar mood—introspective, funereal almost. But Bach’s interior world is a highly expressive place. The opening bars of the Prelude are so subtle and impressionistic, that if played very slowly on a resonant piano as they often are, we could almost forget which century we’re in. However modern the initial effect, though, Bach’s reliance on the same tiny rhythmic pattern virtually throughout soon gives the game away. Sequential patterns like these, resolving onto ever more expressive chords, was a thoroughly 18th-century technique. When Bach wrote it, the five-voice Fugue was already of the nostalgic, backward-looking type, cast in what he might have referred to as the stile antico. Moving at a slow, regular pulse, the fugal theme is clarity itself: a falling interval (a fourth), a pause, and then four stepwise descending notes. The spice is added by the expressively wide ninth interval between the opening two notes and the next four.