Quick morning session today and a reminder that performing is about concentration as much as anything else. The dog was chewing and squeaking; the cat was flopping... and I let it get to me! Anyway, this is a more-or-less clean take with small errors and I was feeling very tentative. Not moving on yet; tomorrow I'm gonna hit the problem spots hard so we can move on! I expect this will get more interesting when we get to variations I've never even looked at before.
A quick note about the Aria: it's full of nonstandard ornamentation. Here's a nice summary: Bach ornamentation. So part of learning this piece was just learning the notation; sadly you don't get to share that with me since I worked on it a while ago. What's especially interesting though, is that different artists interpret the same ornamentation differently; one of the reasons I like the Feltsman recording so much is the way he weaves these trills and mordants together in a way that feels precise yet natural.
To give you an idea of what we're working with here, take a look:
The image shows the weird ornamentation (and how it's all over the place). It also shows the effect I mentioned yesterday, where a note is sustained manually while new notes are added over top. This also happens all over the place. Bach manages to sound relatively simple and sublime, but is technically so so difficult. This is just the theme; these variations get much harder. This should be fun!
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