Partitas pour clavecin BWV 825-830

Description

The sound of the instrument itself, right from the Praeludium of the First Partita, will surprise, stiff, dry, lacking in color, leaving some immediately by the wayside. The others are likely to abandon ship during the Allemande, which rushes by and ignores the charms. Who played Bach like this, ardent, eager, little concerned with effect and in fact devoured by the text, this motorist Bach, who wants to be abstract? Glenn Gould. Mahan Esfahani struggles to hide his model; I note that for all its modernity, his harpsichord also struggles to be played with such force, but one cannot deny here a vision and a statement that, while they may exhaust the listener with a constant foreground, seize the text with a predatory harshness that the Partitas have not known since Ralph Kirkpatrick. This radical proposition culminates in the absolute work that is the Sixth Partita; ideally, one should start listening with it to accept the harpsichordist's so absolute point of view. In any case, this peremptory gesture, which reveals the mechanics of the instrument in place of its poetry, will be quite an experience... then we will return to the miraculous cantabile of Scott Ross... or to the sunny lyricism of Blandine Verlet.