Robert Woolley - Bach: Partitas (1998)

Distinguished harpsichordist Robert Woolley performs Bach’s six Partitas.In this recording, Robert Woolley takes account of manuscript corrections and performance indications - particularly ornamentation - found in several exemplars of the original edition, including Bach’s own Handexmplar, making for a particularly authentic performance.

Following in the footsteps of Kuhnau, a great influence on him when he was young and his predecessor at Leipzig, Bach inaugurated his great cycle of keyboard publications with a work entitles Clavier-Übung (Keyboard Practice) consisting of six ’Partitas’ - suites. We know that he originally intended to publish seven (as Kuhnau did), but it is not known why the seventh in F major failed to materialize. He also borrowed from Kunau the concept of a series of suites whose keys stand for each of the keynotes of the scale.

It is hard to detect any obvious debt to Kuhnau in the musical substance of Bach’s Partitas. They were written thirty-five years later in a more up-to-date style, but still appealed to the same market - a market made up of enthusiastic and cultivated amateurs.

With his musical public in mind, Bach offers a dazzling array of sharply differentiated styles and techniques, partly reflected in the colorful musical titles of the preludes and the intermezzi or ’andern Galanterien’, lightweight dances of optional type inserted towards the end of each suite. Each of the introductory movements embodies a different compositional principle: through-composed prelude (No 1), tripartite sinfonia (No 2), two-part invention (No 3), French overture (No 4), concerto-ritornello form 9No 5) and toccata-and-fugue (No 6). Moreover, the traditional dance types are often handled in startlingly contrasted and original ways; for example, compare the polonaise-like style and lucid three-part texture of the Sarabande from Partita No 3 with the slow, grave, full-textured Sarabande from No 6, lavishly ornamented in French style. The imitation of foreign styles was highly fashionable in German music of the day, and Bach goes out of his way to juxtapose the French and Italian styles at every opportunity, drawing the player’s attention to the contrasts by varying the language of the movement title.