Search - Johann Sebastian Bach, Murray Perahia :: Bach: English Suites Nos. 1, 3 & 6

Bach would probably approve

kiwimuzo | Auckland, New Zealand | 05/26/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"As a singer, I'm naturally a big fan of Bach - his sense of phrase and natural melodic line is unmatched by any other Baroque composer. Having purchased Murray Perahia's complete recordings of Mozart piano concerti, I knew what he was capable of, and bought this recording (for about $US4 in a bargain bin!) on spec. I was not disappointed! Perahia gets to the heart of the matter - none of this 'make-the-piano-sound-as-much-as-possible-like-a-harpsichord' rubbish - he relies on musicianship and beauty, so that each of the dances moves freely and display the intent of character. Doubtless Bach would have appreciated that more than the instrument, anyway!My favourite would have to be track 16 (the Prelude from Suite No.6), which displays all Bach's subtle nuances of sequence, imitation and 'canonic interference' - including the wonderful 'triple endings' that keep you guessing. Do get this - I fully intend to buy the matching album with the other suites, as this one is starting to wear out!"

Bach the Reconciler

A Certain Bibliophile | 04/15/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Just as the greatest performers of Bach's music achieve a balance between the demands of his contrapuntal craft and his harmonic vision; just as they slight neither the figural detail nor the overall harmonic thrust; so did Bach reconcile competing international styles through his keyboard compositions.



One of the celebrated musical rivalries of the eighteenth century, between Italian and French musical styles, came to a head during the 1750s, when Italian opera troupes appeared in Paris, and such luminaries as Rousseau took the Italian side, while Rameau and others defended the French manner. It took years for the two camps in this "Guerre des Bouffons" to reach a generally approved synthesis of the two national styles. By that time, Bach had already worked through this problem for himself, and an important stage in his brilliantly satisfying reconciliation of the two styles is found in a set of six English suites. Since they existed only in manuscript, it would be many years before they were known throughout the musical world.



The designation "English" in no way intrudes another national claim into the discussion, because Bach never knew his suites by that name. (The manuscript title "Suites avec prelude" may be in Bach's hand.) A number of possible explanations have grown up for the heading "faites pour les Anglois" found on a pupil's manuscript, but those accounts are so inconclusive that a proposal emerged in the nineteenth century to call them Bach's German Suites. That attempt was not without merit, since it was a glory of the German Baroque to absorb the innovations of the best foreign composers and to deploy the Italian musical language like natives. Buxtehude was among the composers who most influenced Bach in the appropriation of the Italian styles. Bach was not alone, but neither was he equaled, in his zeal to master the French ways of doing things, as well. The Italians were thought to write a more "natural" music (hence the championship of Rousseau, that idealizer of the "noble savage"), music whose melody was unrivalled in its suave flexibility - rather like the Italian language. The French were reckoned superior at a more artificial charm, and their harmonies were fuller and thicker than the more transparent Italian textures. These differences, for Bach, simply added more opportunity for variety within his own stylistic unities.



While Bach would certainly have agreed with his contemporaries in seeing Italy as the fons et origo of all that was graceful in contemporary melody (having carefully copied out many a seventeenth-century Italian's music and followed the very latest concerto and operation developments avidly), he was clearly fascinated with what the masters among the French keyboard composers were doing (copying out their many scores, as well). Occasionally he gave a hint that the example of such maitres was in his mind by using a French tempo marking. He and his colleagues were also capable of sending messages of stylistic versatility of their title pages through the spelling of their names, and a Sigr. Giovanni Bach could become Mons. Jean Bach at a moment's notice. But the unpublished English Suites had no title page, and Bach was never known to proclaim anything of their creative process elsewhere.



Though that process was supremely one of musical expressivity, it was just as thoroughly one of organization and integration. There are no loose ends, and every detail is intricately related to every other detail and to the whole. In these works (from his late twenties or early thirties) we see many things that also characterize the mature Bach. Numbers, and even numerology, played a great part in Bach's life, and in most of his collections he highlights the number six. German composers before him had used that number as a reflection of the Creator's six days of labor in Genesis. As in so many other instances, Bach gives us six suites of six movements each (compare, for example, the Suites for Solo `Cello); and the arrangement of keys in a stepwise row (A, a, g, F, e, d) is like that of the two-part inventions and other works - though this has no implication for performance order, since the performance conventions of the eighteenth century (before formal concerts and recording) provided no opportunity for performing all the suites together.



Then there was the careful juxtaposition of disparate styles. Living in London was a French composer, Dieupart, whose suites Bach admired and closely studied. One way we know this is that the theme of the Prelude of first English Suite is based on one of the Frenchman's gigues. (It is even possible that Dieupart's thematic contribution and adopted address caused someone to think of Bach's suites as "English.") That the model was the work of a French composer and the Prelude in question was very much in an Italian manner immediately implies an international vision. Some of the other English Suites Preludes are even more emphatically in the modern Italian style (such as the concerto guise of Prelude #3, in which the illusion of two solo instruments periodically emerges from the texture.)



But the dances themselves remain faithful to the French models, while the transforming those models. They are changed (as Manfred Bukofzer noted half a century ago), not so much into something German, as into something Bachian. Warring national styles have famously made their peace within this man of genius, and we can hardly exaggerate the serenity of Bach's syntheses.



Murray Perahia has perceived a kinship between the harmonic procedures of Bach's chorale harmonizations and his dances in the English Suites. There is also good evidence that this was explicitly and increasingly in Bach's mind. In German music of the eighteenth century, the word partita could be designate either of two forms: variations on a melody (as in the partitas on chorale tunes by Pachelbel) or a suite of dances. In his early youth Bach produced three chorale partitas, and in the maturity of his Clavierbung, he gave us a set of six Partitas that were his last word on the subject of the dance suite. One of his great mentors, Buxtehude, had gone so far as to write all allemandes, courantes, sarabandes, and gigues on chorale tunes! Bach seeks a more subtle integration: the English Suites neither contain chorales, nor are they themes with variations. But, in the consistent harmonic frameworks that Murray Perahia has detected, they combine the most powerful element of both genres. We see Bach doing what he does best: he observes the whole musical world around him, gathers the finest materials into his treasury of musical scores, develops ideas that he finds there, transforms the devices to new uses - and then transcends it all.

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