Keyboardist Richard Egarr brought the first book of "The Well-Tempered Clavier" to Synod Hall in Oakland yesterday afternoon, giving The Renaissance and Baroque Society's audience a unique reading of Bach's seminal composition. Revealing Bach's musical spirit and immutable creative drive, this composition is a monumental work in the history of Western music.

"Well-tempered" is the name of the immediate precursor to our familiar equal-tempered tuning system. Both systems make it possible for composers to modulate from one key to another with as few intonation discrepancies as possible. However, where equal temperament makes each key sound equally tuned, the well-tempered system allows for more individual character associations among the 24 major and minor keys. Bach's work is a collection of 24 preludes and fugues, and Egarr's performance focused on bringing out the characters contained within each individual key.

Egarr's performance style does not shy away from melodic embellishments. These figurations worked well in the preludes, where the style is intended to be freer than the accompanying fugue. In the fugue movements however, his tendency to add figurations to Bach's score became burdensome. Especially at a significant half-cadence in the A Minor fugue, Egarr filled in the structural rest following the cadence with an embellishing scalar run into the resolving harmony. Also, his penchant to manipulate the temporal flow of the fugues to fit his reading of the work became distracting. Though he brought out the character of the G-sharp minor prelude, Egarr allowed the interesting articulation he gave the fugue's main motive to gradually slow the temporal pace too much.

A highlight was the way Egarr drew a circular connection between the first prelude in C Major and the penultimate prelude in B Major. Making the link between these two widely separated movements audible was an interpretive feat. It pointed to Egarr's personal reading of the score. However, too much of the recital came to be a performance about Egarr rather than a performance of Bach.