Tracing Bach

Yaara Tal—better known as half of the fine piano duo Tal & Groethuysen—has come up with an imaginative and novel concept that twins a Bach prelude (mainly from The Well-Tempered Clavier) with a fugue by another composer to create a series of pairings. It’s beautifully conceived and executed, and hearing fugues by Hummel, Alkan, Chopin, Schumann, Arensky, and others twinned with Bach is both thought-provoking and musically very satisfying. The program closes with “Tempus fugit,” a brand-new work by German composer Reinhard Febel that really does convey the idea of time fleeting. Tal plays everything with great style—rhythmically acute and with a lovely sense of poetry.