I'm migrating this from
@First Aspect's terribly emotional thread, as we're straying from his project brief.
It's an enlightening game to take slow pieces and see how far you can push them speed-wise till they are just wrong by being too fast: it's a good way to recalibrate what feels right. Sometimes you end up not particularly liking the faster version, but by then you've made the slow version sound ridiculously ponderous, and you can't go back.
Specifically in the case of the Bach G-string Air, the way to adjust your perception is to play just the chords with the bass still playing quavers but not jumping octaves. Get it to a speed where it makes musical sense without the melody (for me that's about 60bpm, and what I would call the tactus, or sense of rhythmic 'tread'), then *sing* the melody on top, like an improvised melisma. It turns it into an ecstatic outpouring of melody, rather than a dirge.
The thing is, it doesn't really work just speeding up a slow recording, as those players have shaped the melody thinking in a quaver pulse, rather than a pulsing crotchet tactus.
So there.
And here endeth today's music appreciation lecture.