Sleeping Eye

Recorded for EMI between 1933 and 1936, these Edwin Fischer performances of Bach's 'Well-Tempered Clavier' set the standard for all subsequent interpretations of this most famous collection of preludes and fugues. Fischer brings to each piece what seems like just the right articulation, phrasing, tempo, and dynamics, such that they all breathe intelligence and humanity. Fischer's achievement is doubly impressive when one considers that he recorded these difficult and texturally exposed works prior to the era of tape editing. But perhaps it was this lack of technology that has lent these performances their immediacy. In the words of Alfred Brendel, "The inner glow of Fischer's incomparably luminous sound is ideally captured by the 1933-36 recordings, the quality of which should make many a modern sound engineer blush."