Tatyana Nikolayeva, the pianist on this album, was a student of Alexander Goldenweiser, a great Russian pedagogue, and later studied composition with Yevgeny Golubev at the Moscow Conservatory.
Composition History
Bach's The Art of Fugue was long thought to be a deathbed composition, but recent research indicates he was working on it in the early 1740s and revised it later in life.
Interpretation
Tatyana Nikolayeva chose to order the movements of The Art of Fugue by placing the canons to demarcate groups of fugues, a choice differing from the first published edition.
Performer Biography
Dmitri Shostakovich, a jury member at the 1950 Bach Competition in Leipzig, was so impressed by Nikolayeva's ability to play Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues from memory that he composed his own 24 Preludes and Fugues for her.
Performer Biography
Tatyana Nikolayeva was also a composer, with works including two Piano Concertos, 24 Concert Studies for Piano, a Piano Sonata, and an arrangement of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf for solo piano.
Compositional Technique
The Art of Fugue was notated on four staves, which led some commentators to believe it was scored for four instruments, though it can be played on a keyboard by two hands.
Recording & Production
This recording captures Tatyana Nikolayeva's live performance in Helsinki in April 1993, less than seven months before she suffered a stroke during a performance in San Francisco and passed away.
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