Bach: The Art of Life

Join Daniil Trifonov for a dazzling solo recital recorded as part of our “Musical Moment” series. The Russian pianist’s latest Deutsche Grammophon album, Bach: The Art of Life (out on 8 October) presents music by JS Bach and four of his sons, as well as two pieces that were Bach family favourites. Here he performs the album’s monumental centrepiece – Johann Sebastian’s late masterpiece <em>The Art of Fugue</em>, whose fourteen fugues and four canons explore different contrapuntal ways of treating a single theme. As the pianist explains, though the work is based on mathematical principles, it is “far more than a scientific experiment: as always with Bach, [it is] music of indescribable beauty and emotion”. <em>The Art of Fugue</em> was left unfinished at Bach’s death, and Trifonov has composed his own stylistically respectful conclusion to its final fugue. He ends this recital with Dame Myra Hess’s moving transcription of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”.