Bach, J S: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2 (Das Wohltemperiertes Klavier, BWV870-893)

“At its best, Crossland's Bach is intimately scaled and sensitively nuanced, abetted by engineering that reproduces her dulcet sonority in the loveliest light.” Gramophone Magazine, 2008 Awards Issue

“Shared between three instruments, this enterprising French venture casts interesting new light. Not all is gains. If the C major prelude asks for the organ, and its sonority, thunderous or gently fluting, suits the G minor and E major preludes and fugues, in the E flat major and F major preludes its sustained notes confuse the texture. The harpsichord, fine in rapid music, can sound laboured, and it is wasted on the rich chromatic harmonies of the G sharp minor. The piano, after all, comes out best, splendid in the F sharp minor and A flat major. Now, please, a clavichord recording.” Sunday Times, 3rd August 2008 ***

"As a Bach player Diana Boyle is at once fastidious and a free spirit. As in her recording of the six Partitas on Integra, she is passionately concerned here to bring out the full, independentmindedness of Bach's endlessly subtle part-writing, and to this end invests her playing with an astonishing boldness of dynamic and accentual detail. Almost entirely avoiding the pedals, yet also avoiding undue dryness of texture, she re-creates these preludes and fugues - generally more extended and daring than the earlier 24 - with a clarity that can be brutally emphatic or imperturbably poised but is gripping just the same. No questions of phrasing or inflection, or even of what instrument to use, are taken for granted. Everything is newly invented, and crackling with intellectual enerty. These pieces emerge in truly towering sequence." The Sunday Times