Color.

Andras Schiff gave an hour-long lecture about J S Bach last night at Davies Symphony Hall. The pianist recently began a two-year residency with the San Francisco Symphony, during which time he’s devoting much attention to Bach.

There’s an effortless yet quiet sense of humor to the man which I find charming. He seems very self-effacing in spite of his grandeur at the keyboard.

Of the many fascinating things that Schiff mentioned during his talk, which the pianist deftly accompanied with short musical excerpts to illustrate the points he wanted to make, the thing that I found most interesting was his interpretation of certain pieces by Bach in terms of the color spectrum.

For Schiff, every key in which Bach wrote a Prelude and Fugue in The Well-Tempered Clavier brings to mind a different color of the rainbow. According to the pianist, C Major is white, E Major is light blue, G Major is green, and B Minor is black. He played excerpts from the pieces Bach wrote in those keys to illustrate his assertions.

Read the rest at Arts Journal.

“To me, Bach’s music is not black and white; it’s full of colors,” writes András Schiff. “In my imagination, each tonality corresponds to a colour. The WTC … provides an ideal opportunity for this fanciful fantasy. Let’s imagine that in the beginning there was innocence and therefore C major (all white keys) is snow-white. The last piece of both books is in B minor, which is the key of death. Compare the fugue of Book I to the Kyrie of the B-minor Mass. This has to be pitch-black. Between these two poles we have all the other colors – first the yellows, oranges and ochre (between C minor and D minor), all the shades of blue (E-flat major to E minor), the greens (F major to G minor), pinks and reds (A-flat major to A minor), browns (B-flat), grey (B major) and finally black. Of course this is a very personal interpretation, and each listener may have a different opinion. Nevertheless, if some of us happen to believe that music is more than just a series of notes and sounds, then a little bit of fantasy is welcome.”

More at Vancouver Recital Society.

Here's Schiff discussing Bach and his recent recording of The Architect of Sound 's Well-Tempered Clavier ...