As a colleague of mine once neatly put it (about another artist), I like the way Haugsand plays the notes; what I don't like is the way he puts them together. When NA reviewed his previous disc of the Italien Concerto and the B minor partita (9/88), he admired him in general but was somewhat disturbed by inappropriate rubatos (a failing I had criticized in his debut Simax recording of music by Marchand in 1982), especially when applied uniformly: in the six years that have since elapsed, Haugsand's perchance for some mannerisms seem to have got out of hand.
I must be honest and say that, though the quick movements here have a fine, vigourous thrust, elsewhere I find him so intent on drawing attention to his pernickety phrasing and underlining every expressive nuance—also adopting, throughout, the left-hand-before-right habit favoured by romantic nineteenth-century pianists—that his playing becomes intensely self-conscious, full of affetuoso lingerings and hesitations, and increasingly annoying. Premonitions of what to expect are apparent right from the start, with the B flat partita's prelude and allemande tiresomely pulled about and not allowed to flow; even more distorted are the sarabandes of this and the D major partitas. There is some fussy articulation, like Glenn Gould at his most eccentric (as in the D major courante), and has in bar 4 of his earlier Italien Concerto he feels he has to exaggerate the two-quaver phrase-ending of the D major air (even in each statement of the G major Preambulum's initial line he refuses to treat it simply).
I could applaud his clean technique (admirable in the complex G major Gigue), his small variant in repeat (perhaps a bit too free in the B flat Minuets), his well-chosen tempos (only the A major Gigue plods) and his decision to offer the E minor Gigue in its 'square wheel' and ternary readings; and I would certainly praise the reproduction of the German two-manual harpsichord (possibly by Mietke, but much altered). But if only he would let the music speak for itself—as he does in such movements as the G major Courante, the A minor Scherzo or the 9/8 section of the D major overture—instead of loading it down with doubtless well-intentioned but unwelcomed sophistication!'