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Reviewer: Alex
McGehee This recording, Murray Perahia’s debut disc for Deutsche Grammophon after 43 years with Sony, follows a long series of Bach recordings by Perahia that have received rave reviews and critical awards. Among them are performances of the keyboard concertos with the ASMF, the English Suites, the complete Partitas, and the Goldberg Variations. Almost universally, Perahia is praised for his luminous beauty, control, balance and clean articulation in this repertoire. Those elements are not missing in his latest release. Perahia’s ordeals with a seriously injured right thumb, which began in 1991 with an infected paper cut, forced him to abstain from any playing whatsoever for more than a few years. Those years were hardly lost as the pianist sees it. That was when he engaged in an intensive study of Bach’s entire keyboard opus, even going so far as to employ extensive Schenkerian analysis, a complex theoretical method used to reveal the structural insides of tonal music. Heinrich Schenker, born almost 150 years ago, does not quite hold the central place he once did in music theory, but Perahia is convinced Schenker led him to a much deeper understanding of Bach. Who’s to argue? Perahia’s brilliant series of Bach recordings began in the late 1990s, after and between his forced retreats from the keyboard. Bach never called these works “French Suites” and in fact they are a combination of Italian and French styles absorbed by the composer into his own masterly synthesis of Baroque idioms. Their foundations are found in dance as are many of Bach’s works. There are plenty of contemporary sources of varying authenticity for these works, but some contain Bach’s own revisions, probably made while he was teaching. The earliest source includes most of the first five suites entered in Bach’s own distinct hand as part of the Little Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach (1722). Anna Magdalena was Bach’s second wife and had a great liking for the French style. That these works were included in her notebook is evidence of their intended use for pedagogical purposes. Heinrich Nicolaus Gerber, a Bach student for three years, said the composer started him off with the Inventions. “When he had studied these through to Bach’s satisfaction, there followed a series of suites, then the Well-Tempered Clavier.” Almost 300 years later, piano professors still teach Bach that way.
The notes
to Perahia’s recording of the French Suites, headlined “A Personal
Devotion,” are half about the music and half about personal perspectives on
the composer. Even with all the repeats taken and properly varied, these two
CDs are about 43 and 48 minutes long, leaving plenty of room for other of
Bach’s works associated with the French Suites. The former Wunderkind Lang
Lang once famously said, “Eighty percent of pianists play pretty bad after
they turn 60.” The Chinese pianist probably never heard a live performance
by Claudio Arrau, Rudolf Serkin, or Jorge Bolet, to name just a few. They
all played beautifully well past the age of 60. Arthur Rubinstein was 95
when he died in 1982, the year Lang Lang was born. For the edification of
the once-young, let us add the name of Murray Perahia, who was 66 when he
finally set down a record of his estimable artistry on the French Suites.
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