Bach's Art of Fugue came down to us without any clear indication of the performing forces desired. The fugue was primarily a keyboard genre, and this massive, almost mystically complex extraction of well over an hour's worth of contrapuntal treatments from a simple fugue subject is most often performed on a harpsichord or organ. But the work's abstract quality has invited performances on other instruments for decades. String quartet versions on recordings go back to a Roth Quartet version of the 1930s, in an arrangement to which Roy Harris contributed. But this is a risky way to go, riskier even than novelty arrangements for saxophones and the like that maintain and exploit a sharp contrast between music and medium. The string quartet was not part of Bach's compositional world, but its origins were temporally close enough to the Art of Fugue to make quartet performances sound just a little "off" from Bach's Baroque sound ideal. The liner notes of the
Emerson Quartet's new recording of the work play up the cerebral aspect of the string quartet image; they seethe with diagrams and deep thoughts. But the cerebrations of a Classical string quartet are the witty dialogues of Diderot, not the solitary metaphysics of Leibnitz. The
Emerson seems cognizant of the single-minded intensity of this unique work, but the group doesn't always negotiate the pitfall of sounding too much like a string quartet -- too elegantly expressive, too much like the conversation among learned friends to which the string quartet is so often likened. Bach's fugues aren't conversations, and though lovers of the Art of Fugue will find plenty to interest them here, those looking for their first Art of Fugue might investigate a keyboard version instead -- a work this concentrated is best appreciated without distraction.