“Everything too fast!” snarls an outraged listener after the first movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Italian Concerto. Martin Stadtfeld founded his career with his music and, with many detours, he keeps coming back to him. “Bach total” is the name of the program in the Prinzregententheater, which only contains works by the Thomaskantor – and arrangements and recompositions by Stadtfeld’s own hand. For example, in the final chorus of the St. Matthew Passion, in which he thunders the forte into the keys like an organ, and the piano fogs up impressionistically in the pedal.
Stadtfeld is a pianist of exacerbations, of extremes, even stronger live than on record. And, regardless of taste, he actually always plays too fast, namely faster than his technique allows. In the Corrente and the Gigue of the first Partita in B flat major BWV 825 or the Prélude of the third English Suite in G minor BWV 808, the hands become asynchronous, hit the wrong notes, and the torrent of sound breaks off in unattractive pedal reverberation. But there is a lot to discover, a great deal: when Stadtfeld lets a mechanical music box ring in the gavotte of the English Suite. When he delicately dabs the two bourrées from the French Overture in B minor BWV 831. Or in the last movement of the same work, the eponymous “Echo” sounds pale, barely audible.
Stadtfeld understands Bach, as is well known, not alone, as a totality in himself, as a cosmos from which all music flows. Which is why he unabashedly projects everything back onto him that was then developed for the concert grand piano in terms of articulation and touch, timbres and experiments. That seems wanted, but not sought after, because it happens at the moment, willing to take risks. And it is not for nothing that it finds its regular climax in the sarabands of the three series of suites, whose bizarre rhythm Stadtfeld freely unfolds, full of enchanting ornamentation. Slowly, but not too slowly, at least for our taste.