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[TOLGA] My name is Tolga. I'm a student at the Royal College of Music on the Artist
Diploma course. I'll also be the Mills Williams Junior
Fellow this year. Here is an amazing instrument. It's a
Copy by Bruce Kennedy of an instrument by Michael Mietke.
It has just arrived in College and I'm one of the first people
to play on it and record on it, so i'm very privileged. The word that came to my
mind when I first tried this instrument was
'noble'. I sat down to play a few chords and I immediately felt like buttoning my
jacket up – with respect, you know? It has such a
resonant and clear sound. And I had played
on so many different harpsichords before, with different registration facilities
and different sound qualities, but never had I played on an instrument
with such a resonant and clear singing single eight on the lower manual,
so it's a very special instrument – it's a very concentrated sound, it's very
singing and beautiful. I chose this particular prelude and fugue
because it demonstrates a variety of the performer's skills. For example the
prelude is a toccata-style two-part invention
where the performer can show his finger work –
literally – and then the contrasting fugue is a,
is a richly contrapuntal texture and the clarity of sound on the lower
manual eight – single eight, without coupling it – allows the
performer to show this clear contrapuntal writing.
So that's why I chose this particular prelude and fugue. I think it allows the performer to
show facilities of this instrument very well.
One of the other reasons why I chose this particular piece
is because we have one of the earliest manuscripts of this piece in the Library
here at the College by Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, who was a
very important theorist and composer music critic and journalist at
the time, and it's I think very important to have
such an amazing manuscript available to us so that we
have a closer contact with the composer and their time.
[PETER] This manuscript actually comes from Bach's time and was copied by
one of his copyists – a gentleman called Marpurg.
It actually contains 22 of the 24 fugues, and only the fugues, from the
second book of the Well-Tempred Clavier. Here we've got the D minor fugue that
you've just heard. The manuscript itself came into the
College as one of our founding manuscripts back in the 1880s
and is a really important source for this work.
There is no complete autograph manuscript of
the second book and so, actually, these items actually become very important to
find out what Bach was wanting to transmit to eternity.
The College is incredibly lucky to have extensive special collections.
We have nearly 20,000 manuscripts running from the 16th century
through to the 21st century. Unusually this source actually only contains 22 of
the 24 fugues and none of the preludes, which –
again – suggests it probably was copied by Marpurg,
because that was the area that he was really interested in.
One of the greatest pleasures of being the Librarian at the Royal College of
Music is to give students the opportunity to
see these sources and to see how that affects the way that
they approach the music and how it then reflects in the performances they give
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