Daniel-Ben Pienaar was born in South Africa, where he made his debut aged 14 in the Liszt E flat Concerto. After winning his country's National Youth Music Competition and the University of South Africa Overseas Music Scholarship Competition, he entered the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he won the Queen's Commendation in 1997 and held the Hodgson Fellowship in 1997/8.

He has been active as recitalist and chamber musician and now divides his time between studying this repertoire and its contexts, teaching at the Academy (where he is piano professor and academic lecturer), playing and recording.

Works he has performed include cycles of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, six Partitas, and Goldberg Variations, the eighteen Mozart Sonatas, Chopin's four Ballades and complete set of Waltzes. His first recording was of the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier (2003). This was followed by a Chopin recital (including the four Ballades) for Victor Japan. The second book of the WTC was released at the beginning of 2005. In 2006 he made the first complete recording of the keyboard works of Orlando Gibbons (on the Deux-Elles label).

In 2008 he gave a four concert cycle of all Schubert's completed piano sonatas at the Duke's Hall of the Royal Academy of Music and recorded Mozart's last nine piano sonatas. The completion of this cycle is projected for 2009. Future projects include recording the Schubert sonatas and performing all Chopin's 'late' works.

His chamber music collaborations have included extensive travelling in Japan with violinist Narimichi Kawabata, performing Bach's Art of Fugue on the harpsichord and chamber organ with Martin Knizia, and recording music for trumpet and piano (mostly of his own arrangements) on the Linn label with Jonathan Freeman-Attwood.

... no doubt that this South African-born pianist is a thinking virtuoso. In the company of such contrasting practitioners as Edwin Fischer, Samuel Feinberg, Sviatoslav Richter and Glenn Gould, he seems determined to leave his own mark on this music.
- BBC Music Magazine

Daniel-Ben Pienaar's performances are quite simply stunning. The instrument he plays matters much less than his musicianship, which is evident at every turn.
- Gramophone

A kaleidoscope of colours and textures in performances that combined the dramatic with the ethereal, the monumental with the intimate'
- International Piano

Liner Notes for Book 1

Bach's collection of twenty-four preludes and fugues from 1722 constitutes the first truly persuasive application of a keyboard tuning with all the major and minor keys accessible. To Bach this probably meant Andreas Werckmeister's so-called 'well-tempered' tuning, or perhaps his own system - in either case a close approximation of what would later become standardised as 'equal temperament'. The poetic range and compositional perfection of this demonstratio provided an advocacy for a richly-extended harmonic language so powerful that its effect would be felt beyond the times of Wagner and Brahms. The book shows Bach at once at his most systematic and at his most unpredictable and playful. In total one can only describe it as an heroic endeavour - here Bach strives for variety-for-the-sake-of-variety in the highest sense. No genre or style is left unexamined, no keyboard instrument or ensemble texture not recalled in some sense or other. With the greatest virtuosity of craft he moves between references direct and references oblique, between that which is more or less strict and that which is more or less free, astonishingly never flagging in affective commitment.

The sheer extent of Bach's intentions is shown by the opening and closing pages in the book: the transparency and brevity of the C major prelude are worlds apart from the gravitas and complex working-out of the B minor fugue, the chromatic subject (including all twelve semitones) of the latter the starkest possible contrast to the limpid white-key arpeggiations at the outset of the book. A kind of Mona Lisa in music, the mystique of this first prelude depends not least on the persistent temptation to 'explain away' its elusive beauty in mundane terms. Are these simple broken chords but improvisatory testing of the new tuning? Ironic then that this piece should sound even more exquisite on an 'untempered' meantone instrument. This archetypal keyboard texture finds its complement in the rising scale - also neatly fitting under the hand - of the succeeding fugue subject. This step-wise ascent is of course also a vocal archetype, and Bach develops the initial cantabile into a sense of 'community', even of fervour, with the successive stretti. It is indeed one of the outstanding traits of Bach's fugal writing that subdued characteristics of a subject may come to the fore as a narrative unfolds, or that contrasting characterisations of the same subject may themselves become the driving force behind a narrative. In such cases - where the fugal grammar is so bound up with unfolding ideas - the performer must consider varying the articulation/enunciation of the fugue subject itself. Strict adherence to a single articulation is a pedantic residue of the didactic use of these works.

A different kind of fervour from that of the C major fugue informs the often hushed figurations that surround the cantus firmus subject of the F minor fugue. With this fugue Edwin Fischer builds a darkly impressive edifice, rather reminiscent of Busoni's version for piano of Ich ruf zu dir Herr Jesu Christ (BWV 639). He relishes the somewhat wayward, nevertheless compelling capability of the piano to sustain extremely long gradual crescendi. But, over-viewing the entire book (that is, as a wondrous study in variety), illuminating possibilities are uncovered when resisting a treatment of all the bigger fugues as climactic statements. The D-sharp minor fugue, when read as a type of liturgical intimation, is a case in point, the learned contrapuntal devices of this ricercar-like piece eventually distilling the theme into luminous augmentations. By contrast, in the C-sharp minor fugue any stile antico or mannerist origins are completely subsumed by the intense emotional content; in the case of the E-flat major prelude, by a wonderful (French) opulence. What performer can abstain from seeking to physically realise the grandeur of these work?

The E-flat prelude is one of the pieces strongly suggestive of the organ, and in the succeeding fugue there is a hint of the four-foot registration of the high flutes. At the end of the B-minor fugue there is the extreme option of doubling with octaves in the bass, in the old tradition of the 'romantics': it is hard to think of any moment more monumental in the keyboard literature than this concluding Soli Deo Gloria. Edwin Fischer famously plays the walking quaver left hand of the final prelude in octaves. Wanda Landowska, however, points out a similarity to the lightly scored, intense So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen from the St Matthew Passion (here, of course, without the startling choral interjections). Another interesting suggestion from Landowska comes with her splendid sixteen-foot harpsichord registration (an almost Gothic effect) for the C-sharp minor prelude - which she describes as being "like a courante à la française", even though it is perhaps more persuasively sicilienne- or even loure-like, a classification ultimately imponderable.

The long fugue in A minor is a final instance where gargantuan dimensions may be realised with a certain recklessness. Glenn Gould describes this in typical fashion as being one of Bach's "celebrated contrapuntal obstacle courses", and it is indeed that, on an epic scale, schematic and dogged. With the famous B-flat minor prelude and fugue, on the other hand, neither the monumental nor the intimate meanings are set into unambiguous relief. David Ledbetter points out that the fascination in this type of fugue lies not so much in the drama of the entries as the "constant, free and fluid development of the living motivic contrapuntal tissue". He also points out the various pre-Beethovenian interpretations of the upward leap of a minor ninth that features in the fugue subject: wisdom, but also madness, despair, distress. Impossible though, not to recall (albeit anachronistically) its use as an ultimate cris du coeur in Bruckner's Ninth Symphony adagio...

The most intimate sound-worlds are occupied by those clavichord- or spinet-like preludes (several of them with sharp key-signatures: cf. A, E, B and F-sharp majors) where the tone-colour is modulated in the most subtle way. And in the sentimental piety of the fugues in A-flat major and B major with their tender elisions of phrases something of the deep harmoniousness of some later fugues in Book Two of The Well-Tempered Clavier (1744) is prefigured. Does the pianist here take recourse to the picturesque imitation of delicate baroque keyboard instruments - or to post-Chopinesque 'pianistic' mores?

As Charles Rosen suggests, the pianist-performer playing Bach necessarily accepts the obligation to make public that which undoubtedly was intended largely for private use; although, in the case of The Well-Tempered Clavier 'private' is perhaps a narrow interpretation of Bach's title-page intention: "For the education and improvement of musical youth desirous of learning and for the particular delight of those already skilled in this discipline" - especially considering evidence that, certainly by the later eighteenth century, several of the pieces were indeed deemed suitable for performance on the organ. In any case, we now approach and appropriate this part of the canon within a frame of reference absolutely unlike that of its creator. Drawing on the honourable history of the piano as the instrument of allusion and arrangement (and all Bach playing on a modern concert grand is after all transcription) the pianist must make a special kind of personal commitment. He can realise ideas, images and counterpoints that may well exist with equal force in the mind of a talented listener, but the 'performing' carries the risk of personal failure. The sweeping 'reduction of means' current in so many performing conventions smacks of the ancient prejudice of mind over body, while in fact rendering some of the most life-enhancing expressive pathways inaccessible.

Also unfortunate is that the pedagogical use of the work has led to a certain amount of cherry-picking, and consequently to a fossilisation in the way in which some of the popular pieces are heard. Bach's talent for elevating and complicating the musical ambitions of simple instruction material is in fact beautifully evident in some of these very pieces. Eleven of the first twelve preludes (that in E-flat the exception) appear in the ClavierbŸchlein for Bach's son Wilhelm Friedemann, several of them in much simpler guises. His reworkings of the C minor and D major preludes, for example, consist of adding cadenza-like flourishes in the final bars to brilliant rhetorical effect, thereby transforming the meaning of the exercise-like opening sections. For the prelude in C-sharp major an effective new texture, much like one of Rameau's batteries, is worked over a much-extended dominant bass, producing a coup of virtuosity, while for that in D minor the characteristic tactile figuration at the opening is allowed to evolve in an uncanny play of free association. The new presto section at the end of the E-minor prelude forms a masterly transition to the style and nature of the argumentative fugue while continuing the left-hand pattern of the opening part. It is the spinning-out of the top voice into a searing cantabile of this slow opening section that is, however, the most spectacular of the additions. Suggestive of passion music, a latent sense of great drama permeates this pristine texture.

It is often easy to hear where the music is covertly cross-referencing or playing with hybrid forms or textural stock-in-trades: the A-flat major prelude, for instance, a sonata-allegro with strings (in spite of its flat key); the glorious virtuosity of the 'figuration' prelude in G major spilling over into its concertante fugue. At other times it is more difficult, even fruitless, to try to categorise a gesture or a shape or a style of delivery, often so when tracing dance ancestries: the F major fugue may well be an irrepressible kind of passepied, but, as with the C-sharp minor prelude, it is no use seeking a place for the prelude in E-flat minor as an ornate sonata-sarabande, or that in F minor as a slow sonata-allemande, the sum so much greater than the parts in these pieces. The workman-like Bach reveals himself throughout this book as a tireless collector and rethinker of ideas and inventions, all the while, without a trace of cynicism, striving for an absolutely comprehensive art - Isaiah Berlin's hedgehog and fox in equal measure!

In the minds of those interpreters who, either as listeners or players, wish to 'ingest' the work, its rich tapestry may be gradually over-layed by - in some cases even become indistinguishable from - the richness of thoughts and feelings of those, present and past, who have also contemplated it, and through whom we have come to know it: at once a burden and a spur to creativity. One may broadly survey the simple sincerity and high art of an Edwin Fischer or the deep convictions of a Samuel Feinberg, the energetic revolt against tradition (or perverse posturing?) of a Glenn Gould, the sheer acts of will of a Sviatoslav Richter, the various textural and gestural lessons that may be gleaned from performances on the range of historical instruments, or the more or less recent tendency towards digital clarity and micro-shaping and away from that which we may call persuasive 'spontaneous' utterance. It is a measure of the greatness of Bach's score that it can still 'speak directly' to so many - and can hint at, or at least make us long for, the recovery of some kind of poetic innocence.

Recording producer: Jonathan Freeman-Attwood
Engineer: Kirstin Cowie
Editing: Kirstin Cowie
Revised edit (2007): Daniel-Ben Pienaar
Piano technician: Clive Ackroyd
Recorded 15th-16th July 2003 at the Duke's Hall of the Royal Academy of Music, London

Liner Notes for Book 2

In Thomas Mann's novel Lotte in Weimar an old Goethe muses on the achievements of his youth and of his maturity - the former the work of "genius", the latter the work of "greatness". Such thoughts perhaps passed through Bach's mind too when surveying his own keyboard output, and the profound differences in sensibility that distinguish the second volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier from the first - the two collections more than twenty years apart. Where Book 1 proudly displays its brilliance, Book 2 is brilliantly elusive; while Book 1 exudes the confidence of a man who can survey all, Book 2 adopts the searching manner of a man who has surveyed all for a long time. Ultimately it is this second part that breathes an air of utter fulfillment, both in the grace with which its most original feats of harmony and counterpoint are executed within beautiful arcs of musical thought, and in its striking, nuanced character definitions for each of the twenty-four keys.

One of the most telling differences between the books is to be found in the contrasting intentions behind the fugues that conclude their two halves. The 12th and 24th fugues of Book 1 are grandiose contrapuntal masterpieces on two of Bach's most impressive chromatic subjects; in Book 2 they are middle-scale dance fugues. But closer consideration of the concluding piece of Book 2 is especially revealing: we cannot agree with Rosalyn Tureck's assertion that it is with a "mood of utmost good humour" that Bach brings to an end this ne plus ultra of the keyboard literature. This is not the pleasing French dance music of the B minor orchestral suite - the carefully timed chromatic inflections are too suggestive, discomforting; the elaborations of its opening motif in the final phrase too poignant a farewell. Surely a stunning example of what Laurence Dreyfus calls "composing against the grain" to, in such elegant environs, upset expectations with a pained retrospective tinge. Indeed it is one of the fundamental principles in Book 2 to charm the ear through the airiness and ease of the popular stile galant, the profundity of the contrapuntal mastery thus appearing more accessible - and expressive ambiguities more palpable. (Not until the Mozart of the 1780s would the superficialities of contemporary 'popular music' again be so intriguingly transformed...)

The B minor fugue of Book 2 refers us back both to the the F major fugue of Book 1 (which also draws on the rhythm of the passepied), and to the monumental final work in that volume (with which it shares a key signature), and sets there a fresh set of associations, both for the dance and for the key of B minor. It in no way replaces the intentions of Book 1, neither does it constitute a neat complement. Thus it is characteristic of Bach's musical quest that the new should stand alongside the old in his own oeuvre. Thus, rather atypically for his times, he would continue teaching and performing the best of his earlier works throughout his very long Leipzig career - and surely with pride. And yet it is undeniable that the "24 New Preludes and Fugues" of 1744 demonstrate in many instances ever-more complicated, and more artfully hidden, origins - not only of individual works, but of tracts of thought, of expressive currents and of turns of phrase. Often what finally evolves stands isolated, uncanny and strange, striving as it were to betray its own genesis. This of course resonates powerfully with anachronistic notions of individual genius - where the only true unifying principle is the greatness of a single personality - in this case Johann Sebastian Bach. Perhaps the performer, more than anyone, needs to believe in this - as he must, on some level, in the transcendence of the achieved work. He after all must delight and move and amaze the listener by his very own means without daring to divulge origins...

The consciously harnessed progressive didactic aims of the opening pieces of Book 1 find no recognisable counterpart in Book 2. From the outset the attention is captured by tonal warmth and textural sensuousness, and rich poetic intentions. The successive, traceable guises of the opening prelude (its origins going back as far as 1719) reveal Bach developing an archaic organ preambulum idea into an aching invocation of the muse, tightening the voice-leading and tweaking harmonies on each revisiting. Amazingly its inclusion represents second thoughts, the initial intention having been to open with what now stands as Prelude no. 3. That work was undoubtedly deemed too similar to the C major prelude of Book 1 - a caution to the player perhaps that the two pieces should indeed not be too divergent in mood. What a masterstroke then to transpose this piece finally to C-sharp, thereby adding to its distinctive profile the key-associations of the strange and magical, brilliantly carried over into the fugue with its air of sleight-of-hand.

The opening fugue with its running semiquavers invokes the idea of 'flight' (its contrapuntal conceits not being especially demanding), hence of keyboard virtuosity. While a different reading is certainly possible, a performer ignores the chronological proximity of the Goldberg Variations, with its total embrace of this aspect, at his own peril: fleetness of touch is entirely in keeping with the manner and preoccupations of late Bach, but more importantly, serves to clarify the 'goals' of the more involved arguments, relieving the ear even where local clarity may be sacrificed momentarily. (Samuel Feinberg's daring playing is an object lesson in this.) In keeping with the spirit of variety (which pervades in Book 2 as much as in any of Bach's major collections) a layer of moderation is inappropriate where the call is clearly for brilliance - when indeed there are pieces elsewhere where moderation forms part of the expressive tenor. At any rate, the C-sharp minor fugue with its true Couperin-inspired lightness, the D major prelude with its opulent one-in-a-bar, the roguish virtuosity of the A minor fugue (the affect of the Kyrie eleison subject of Mozart's Requiem worlds removed!), the lean, taut texture of the G minor fugue (with the repeated notes in its subject, and the gathering of power on its immensely rhetorical final page) - these present unique technical challenges. On the other hand, there are fascinating instances where avoiding what seems right can have a kind of iconoclastic magnetism. In one of the most jocose of the dance-like fugues (in F minor) we may ignore the bourreé references and turn to an alternative reading instead - slow and contemplative, as convincingly exemplified by Friedrich Gulda. Likewise, Glenn Gould's pointillist treatment of the C-sharp major fugue on his 1966/7 CBS recording seems compelling (if only momentarily...).

With the F-sharp major and A-flat major preludes appearances actually do prove deceiving. The presence of dotted rhythms here, especially in a 3/4 context, do not necessarily indicate grandiloquence alla Francese. Such a laboured reading rather distracts from the essential tenderness of these works. They are miracles of richness achieved within the great transparency of their ritornello frameworks and two-part textures. Superficially they resemble each other, posing a delicate imaginative challenge to the performer to differentiate between them. So do the family of preludes where the writing often resembles two-part inventions (cf. D-sharp minor, E minor, G-sharp minor, A minor, B minor), and all the mellifluous longer preludes - each to be distinctively etched (cf. C-sharp minor, F minor, F-sharp minor, E major, B-flat major - where, just occasionally, images of Horowitz playing slow Scarlatti insinuate themselves!). The very long stretches of lucid linear writing in Book 2 (often with a striking cantabile in the top part) and, unlike Book 1, the almost total absence here of pieces that may be considered as clear-cut vignettes (even the shorter pieces being, more or less, thoroughly considered essays) seems to call, not least, for the player's profound engagement with the colouristic possibilities of his instrument to illuminate shades of meaning and unfolding narratives. The often breathtaking shifts of touch and pedaling that an Edwin Fischer achieves prove essential models for emulation - and indispensable points of definition to listeners too. In this regard one may appraise again Ralph Kirkpatrick's striving for variation of touch within very delicate bounds on his clavichord recording, or indeed, Gustav Leonhardt's pioneering efforts towards a "dynamic inégale playing" in his harpsichord version of 1968. Transcendence in Book 2 is attained, as always with Bach, through the gateways of active feeling and thinking, the player's concern being to avoid the joyless generic.

By 1744 Bach's desire to 'include everything' in his major collections was as profound as ever - to subject even the less-than-elevated to his transforming scrutiny and craftsmanship. The rather straight-forward, quasi-improvised C minor fugue for instance is lifted above the relatively quotidian by a very effective, harmonically pungent stretto at the end. The more challenging attainments are put in relaxed relief, providing another point of access for the listener and performer alike. Thus both the F major and E major preludes make extensive use of four-bar sarabande-like phrases and the style of moto perpetuo figuration with harmonically significant tied notes (stile brisé), but the E major with its easily tangible symmetry of its two halves and delicate tactile variety proves a moment of relaxation, whereas the F major with its continual elisions and ambitious paragraph-lengths, each of its main cadences deeply telling, stands among the most noble and charismatic works in the set. On occasion Bach revisits Book 1 with second thoughts and the ripeness of an Old Master. A comparison of the crystalline E major prelude in Book 1 with the chiaroscuro of the A major of Book 2 is instructive, notably in their sub-dominant reprises and chorale prelude endings (the upward-tending final bars of the A major rather like an inversion of the concluding idea of In dulci jubilo, BWV 608). And the systematic lining up of stretti in the A minor fugue of Book 1 is recast in freer form (as David Ledbetter shows) in the B-flat minor fugue of Book 2 to overwhelming, vertiginous effect - now with stridently chromatic rising and falling counter-ideas and episodic material that not only is effective in framing the main subject matter but also in propelling forward an uncompromising argument.

It is indeed the advanced-key fugues in the minor that provide the most thought-provoking layer of writing in Book 2. The three disparate elements of that in F-sharp minor are each superbly worked, but fail to fully reconcile on the final page, exhaustedly coming to rest on a bleak open octave; and posing one of the enigmas of the set. The three voices of the G-sharp minor fugue seem to converge and diverge with a kind of disembodied freedom, translucent and hypnotic, the work's credentials as a fugue on two subjects, combined in its final section, incidental merely. But it is in the D-sharp minor fugue that one gains the most palpable sense of device and skill falling away from the surface, where every motivic detail seems liberated, manipulable and meaningful in itself. Its strange sound world is one of the more 'modern' creations of Book 2. But then such freedom of technique is the late outcome not least of Bach's life-long pre-occupation with his proud stile antico past (as borne out by Art of Fugue and A Musical Offering too). In this spirit the E major fugue provocatively frames the stylised ecstatic with the most firmly Lutheran of final cadences and the B major fugue can yearningly herald its end-thoughts: looking back with a knowing allegiance to the past, but now devoid of austerity.

The image that Laurence Dreyfus develops of Bach as a critic not only of his colleagues but of the intellectual spirit of his age becomes a resonant one for performer and listener too: re-assessing, re-interpreting, re-applying attainments from the past for Bach always a spur to higher planes of thought and technique; the new-fangled suggesting fresh means by which to grapple with timeless questions, not state-of-the-art practice for garnering applause. Book 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier is in the musician's library happily bestowed canonic status yet not so readily familiar to a large audience; neither does it enjoy the cult status of the Goldberg Variations or Art of Fugue. In other words, it resists the Bach consumerist's needs in a way which renders each reading more a kind of personal manifesto of the performer than a likely success. On the one hand the challenge is to clarify, to make intelligible to those not in the know; on the other to lose one's self on those mysterious pathways where only a deep familiarity - and affection - can lead. Perhaps most abiding is the awe-inspiring image of Bach playing the preludes and fugues at home to his pupil Heinrich Gerber "altogether three times through": a reminder that these wondrous pieces will always be best savoured as private possessions.

Recording producer: Jonathan Freeman-Attwood
Engineer: Kirstin Cowie
Editing: Adam Langston
Piano technician: Clive Ackroyd
Recorded 13th-15th September 2004 at the Duke's Hall of the Royal Academy of Music

All photographs by John Buckman.