E-Mail This Article to a Friend The new Bach Plus Chameleon Arts and a BSO chamber concert BY DAVID WEININGER

No composer was more affected by the period-instrument revolution than Bach: its success totally changed performing attitudes about his music. These days, we not only take care to replace flutes with recorders, we wonder whether we shouldn’t use only one voice to a chorus part in the Passions and the cantatas. Accuracy is the watchword: "What would Bach do?" we ask ourselves. Performances from yesteryear sound impossibly old-fashioned.

It may be that the drive for historically informed performance has had its greatest effect not on instrumentation or on performing forces but on style — not on what we use to perform Bach but on how we approach his music. It isn’t just the massed walls of sound that have largely disappeared — freedom and flexibility in tempo, phrasing, and articulation are in short supply, even from those musicians who still perform on modern instruments. Today’s Bach is lean, proper, and straightforward; minor liberties with the score, once taken for expressive purposes, are now verboten.

Three recent Bach recordings offer an opportunity to evaluate the trend. The immensely talented violinist Hilary Hahn, who will turn 24 this month, has already recorded some lively rethinks of standard repertoire. In her recording of the Bach concertos for Deutsche Grammophon, accompanied by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra under Jeffrey Kahane, she displays her familiar technical agility and tonal purity. But the fast movements fly by with little variation in phrasing, so that the music has a motorized, repetitive quality. Only in the slow movements do Bach’s intensely lyrical melodies breathe, and the results are beautiful. Elsewhere, there’s no room for inflection or grace.

Balance is the hallmark of Murray Perahia’s Bach: his playing is calibrated to let the counterpoint emerge clearly. In the two concertos on his latest Bach recording — the Concerto for Flute, Violin, Piano, and Strings and Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 — he’s unfailingly deferential to his Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields colleagues, allowing his solo part to blend in with the overall texture and enabling the imitation and the development of themes to emerge. But he also sounds hesitant to give the music a clear æsthetic and emotional profile. Even the "Italian Concerto," a work for solo keyboard, sounds anonymous, the high spirits of the outer movements restrained and undemonstrative. Only in the Brandenburg’s famously wild cadenza does Perahia let himself go, with invigorating results.

András Schiff weighs in with his second recording of the Goldberg Variations, this one for ECM. Schiff has played Bach throughout his career, and he’s consistently afforded the music its natural, flexible rhythms, letting the melodies spin out with some degree of freedom. His playing is fluid and refined, and his tone simply glows. But even he cheats Bach’s dance rhythms of some of their punch, and in the more joyous variations he, like Perahia, seems to prefer caution to exuberance. And the magnificent 25th variation — a piercing cry of grief that Schiff in his excellent program note calls "the most profound moment in this work" — flashes by before the tragedy can sink in.

Three recordings out of the hundreds released each year don’t constitute a trend. But it’s worth asking whether the changes in Bach performance over the past 50 years have been an unequivocal gain, and whether we’re ever again likely to see Bach players with the individuality and the expressive power of Glenn Gould, Edwin Fischer, Pablo Casals, and David Oistrakh — musicians who invested every note with vital importance. Today’s Bach players, regardless of their technical prowess, seem increasingly to be coming up short.

THE ROARING TWENTIES. Next Saturday the Chameleon Arts Ensemble offers a program exploring the furious variety of music in the 1920s, from Janá<t-60>ˇ<t$>cek to Fauré to American rebel George Antheil. That’s November 15 at 8 at the First and Second Church in Boston, 66 Marlborough Street. Tickets are $15 to $30; call (617) 427-8200. And it was just prior to the 1920s that Stravinsky wrote L’histoire du soldat ("The Soldier’s Tale") for jazz ensemble and narrator, a work in which, once again, selling your soul to the devil has lousy consequences. The Boston Symphony Chamber Players will perform it along with works by Schubert and Bernard Rands on November 16 at 3 p.m. at Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street. Tickets are $17 to $30; call (617) 266-1200.