Washington, D.C.–based pianists—composer-performer Sam Post and his friend and colleague Ralitza Patcheva—have join forces to reimagine Bach’s iconic Well-Tempered Clavier. Their new recording, The Well-“Tampered” Clavier, Book 1, embraces the expressive possibilities of the modern piano and infuses the music with rhythmic vitality drawn from jazz, ragtime, folk, world music, and twentieth-century classical styles. In the Baroque era, improvising, ornamenting, and reshaping a composer’s original work was standard practice—much like jazz musicians do today. Post and Patcheva lean into that legacy, freely applying rhythmic variation without feeling constrained by the printed page. Post reflects, “Surely this is how Bach felt writing his music—every moment, every note a path chosen, leaving behind equally valid options, but together forming one coherent, human story.”