Now that Kenneth Gilbert's admirable recording of these works (8/86) seems to have been withdrawn, Suzuki's chief rival, so far as harpsichord performance of them is concerned, is his own former teacher Ton Koopman. The latter's recording was characteristically extrovert: Suzuki's approach is more thoughtful and restrained. He is intent on presenting the pieces as artistic entities rather than instructional material - a category to which they are too often condemned; but they afford an extraordinary glimpse into the Bach household when it is remembered that in their original form they were intended for Wilhelm Friedemann, then only nine years old. The title-page on the autograph is worth quoting: 'Straightforward instruction, in which amateurs of the keyboard, and especially the eager ones [my italics], are shown a clear way ... of playing cleanly in two voices but also ... with three ... arriving at a cantabile manner ... all the while acquiring a strong foretaste of composition' - which Bach illustrates by ingenious imitations, canons and inversions.
Suzuki is inclined to favour slow speeds, as in the G major Invention, which sheds all gigue character, and in the canonic C minor, but more especially in several of the three-part Sinfonias: the F minor runs the risk of losing flow. For greater vivacity one has to rely on the two-part Inventions - a delightfully springy F major, an ebullient B flat - but even here a graver note is felt in the F minor, whose melancholy is underlined. Like his erstwhile teacher, Suzuki displays a relaxed attitude to the text, freely embellishing the repeats of the E major Invention, and he adopts a version of the C major which turns two semiquaver patterns into triplets and liberally adds mordents and trills. Unfortunately, the middle register of the instrument here sounds rather tinny.'