Even with the arrival of this frustrating, but often exciting new recording, Bach’s so-called English Suites remain ripe for further exploration. Satisfying recordings have been rare, and the strengths of Murray Perahia’s traversal of Suites Nos. 1, 3 and 6 leave one a bit less content with earlier recordings, while its very apparent weaknesses leave ample room for new interpreters. The problem is one of synthesis.
There is a virtuosity in these works reminiscent of the Toccatas, and an intimacy and surface gleam that suggest the so-called French Suites. They lack neither contrapuntal rigour, nor the moment by moment dexterities of the elegant style. Gould was almost hopeless in these suites, devoted to inner lines that deserved more careful balance, and self-consciously alert to thematic entrances. It is a nasty sound. Schiff, whose highly regarded 1988 recording of the complete suites provides the best point of comparison, focused more on the inwardness of the music, with smooth execution of ornament and layered, rather than exposed, inner lines.
But with Perahia’s version, the problems of Schiff’s approach become apparent. The double-instrument texture to the opening of the Third Suite is, in Perahia’s reading, a substantial orchestral flourish, something exciting and raucous, straight out of the Brandenburgs. He maintains, in the more sweeping movements of these suites, more overall excitement, more rhythmic edge and drive, and a greater variety of keyboard touch. The two Bourees and final Gigue from the First Suite flow effortlessly, sensibly, with a fine balance between steadiness and excitement. Perahia takes the listener from beginning to end of the more animated movements with a commanding and insistent self-assurance.
However, Perahia fails to maintain that assurance elsewhere. In all three Sarabandes, from the First, Third and Sixth Suites, he is surprisingly uncomfortable, his expressivity forced, his dynamics often taken to bizarre extremes. The Sarabande of the First Suite is ungainly, with a strangely public, monumental quality that the music simply doesn’t support. Its anguish becomes grandeur, and never quite relaxes into a private reverie. Here one turns back to Schiff, where the smoothness that is overly slick elsewhere becomes a vocal suppleness, alive and human. Perahia’s difficulty in these movements is surprising, and yet reassuring in a strange way. This music, which has fared better on harpsichord than piano of late, still has its uncharted passages. '