In the beginning, according to the searching, deeply feeling pianist Andras Schiff, there was innocence.

He thinks of the key of C, the one with no flat notes and no sharp ones, the one that uses only the white keys on the piano, as the innocent, pure and untouched one. And when he plays Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” — which moves from C major through all 24 musical keys, one prelude and one fugue for each, then goes through the whole cycle again — Mr. Schiff hears the color of C major as snow-white.

That is easy enough, as is thinking of B minor, the final key each time around, as a deathly pitch-black. Less obvious is his designation of C sharp as yellow, albeit a slightly less intense yellow than C sharp minor. Or D sharp minor as pale blue. Mr. Schiff, 58, has lately been giving a lot of thought to each of the musical keys and the colors he associates with them as he embarks on the Bach Project, a large-scale tour of North America over the next year that will include all that composer’s major keyboard works, played from memory.

Mr. Schiff arrives on Saturday night at the 92nd Street Y, his first New York stop on the tour, to play Book 1 of “Well-Tempered Clavier.” Then he returns on Thursday for Book 2. The stop is well timed: his brilliantly crisp, elegant new recording of that capacious work, on the ECM label, was released last month.