Some readers may be surprised to hear that Bach ever composed sonatas – not suites, but sonatas – for harpsichord. Well, actually he didn’t. What he did do – if indeed it was he and not his eldest son – was transcribe his BWV1003 A minor Solo Violin Sonata (transposing it down a fifth) and the first movement of the BWV1005 C major (putting it down to G); and, more certainly, he himself adapted a number of movements from the Hortus musicus suites (for two violins, gamba and continuo) by Johann Adam Reincken, the aged master to whom, as a teenager, he had journeyed to Hamburg to hear. Taking his cue from Bach, Andreas Staier has transcribed the remaining movements of the C major Violin Sonata and added three movements to the C major Reincken adaptation – a suite, be it noted, not a sonata.
Before purists throw up their hands in horror at Staier’s temerity, let them listen to Bach’s own startlingly audacious harpsichord version of BWV1005, with offbeat chords, surprising chromaticism and rolling left-hand arpeggios. In his own treatment of that work’s Fuga, Staier, like his model in the BWV1003 fugue, is very free but most convincingly idiomatic: one would never guess that it was a transcription. Bach’s arrangements of Reincken largely adhere to the originals but amplify the fugues by adding episodes, as is also the case in the A minor Gigue. Staier’s playing (on a fine copy of an early eighteenth-century German instrument) is notable for the crispness and variety of his articulation and – except of course in the improvisatory Reincken preludes – the wonderfully invigorating vitality of his rhythmic drive. His Reincken C major Fuga is quite irresistible. A splendid disc.'