Performance: The Art of Fugue

Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Reviewer: Tara Werner

Claude Debussy once wrote that music is the arithmetic of sounds, as optics is the geometry of light. A telling comment, and one quite appropriate to Bach's The Art of Fugue.

This collection of 14 fugues arising out of a deceptively simple four-and-a-bit-bars subject highlights the composer as mathematical genius.

But Bach's last highly organised opus is far more than an intellectual exercise. As Indra Hughes outlined in his insightful preamble on Friday night, The Art of Fugue is the last word on counterpoint and fugue, a work that evolves organically with ever-increasing complexity.

The clarity with which he explained, in just over 40 minutes, how each fugue utilises the original subject in a plethora of contrapuntal devices showed Hughes as a natural communicator, and his ability to instil enthusiasm for such an abstract score and the way he created a serene atmosphere with candlelight, focusing on the kauri-lined beauty of the church led to a keen sense of anticipation.

But whether the subsequent patchy performance met such high expectations is open to conjecture.

As if influenced by his late-Victorian Gothic Revival surroundings, Hughes' approach on the organ was initially overblown and surprisingly heavy, with the first four fugues coming across with muddy textures as a result.

Only with the stretto (overlapping) fugues did he provide the necessary lightness in the stops used, allowing each line to breathe, although Contrapunctus 7 was quite uneven rhythmically.

The most satisfyingly performed fugues were those in double and triple counterpoint, with Contrapunctus 8 well articulated and Contrapunctus 11 sounding frighteningly modern in its chromatic clashes.

Matthew Barker, a pupil of Hughes, was the second player in the highly ornamented mirror fugue, Contrapunctus 13, and finally in the unfinished Contrapunctus 14, when the music suddenly stopped, broken off just at the spot where Bach died.

This dramatic gesture seemed to sum up the tone of the concert - beautifully packaged, but more care needed in its interpretative substance.