This is not a review

Last night Roger Woodward played the first of two Adelaide concerts organised by Recitals Australia. Tomorrow night is Shostakovich; last night was Bach, more precisely The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, which he played from start to finish with a short interval in the middle.

Woodward looked gaunt and appeared to be unhappy -- possibly with the state of the piano, a glittery and gorgeous Bösendorfer that a harried-looking person came out to tinker with in piano-tuner mode during the interval, with (to my ears) some success; certainly Woodward looked happier at the end of the second half than he had at the end of the first.

But the music was an extrordinary thing to be in the same room as. Weirdly I have in my small CD collection some Bach music for flute, for lute and for violin, but no keyboard or choral, the things he's best known for. And I don't think I've heard any Bach live since about 2003 when I was skulking in the back row of the Second Sops in the Adelaide Philharmonia Chorus and we sang some. But I recognised every piece last night and often knew what was coming next, so I must have owned some recording of it in some obsolete technology long ago.

The thing is, you recognise Bach straight away, at least with keyboard music. His music has always been my first example of what I'm talking about when I teach writing classes on style, a shameless pinch from Aldous Huxley in (I think) Eyeless in Gaza where some character talks about style and our recognition of it using Bach as an example. It's something to do with the signature mathematical precision and symmetry with which his subjects and countersubjects, his quavers and his demisemiquavers, his arpeggios and his single notes are arranged around each other; the principles appear to the amateur listener to be essentially those of geometry and algebra.

All of that was audible last night. There was the unrelenting logic of the sort of music that forces you to realise that all music is essentially about maths and physics: the displacements of air that determine the length of soundwaves; the regular fractions of time into which notes are divided and played off against each other, as in one extraordinary piece where what appeared to be happening was that the main melody was being played on the offbeat, like a shadow or an echo of its absent self.

But within that cage of logic, logic's enemies, passion and anarchy, resist its containment. Bach's music -- especially, again, the keyboard music, where the logic of each note is so naked and so clear -- is like a heart beating inside a ribcage, or like the idea of a perfectly regular and abstract triangle that has become a red canvas sail on a blue horizon, swelling into three dimensions with a beautiful pregnant roundedness, filled with moving air, the breath of life. Shapes with souls.