Ton Koopman - J.S. Bach: Six Partitas for harpsichord (Clavier Übung I) BWV 825-830 (2012)

For a long time Baroque and Bach specialst Koopman wanted to record this masterpieces of Bach and now was the time to do it! Recorded in the trusted and beautiful-sounding Walloon Church in Amsterdam.

My recording of Bach’s harpsichord partitas was a long time in coming. The main reason was a lack of time (recording Bach’s complete organ works, complete cantatas and Dieterich Buxtehude’s Opera Omnia required much time and attention). Another factor was my respect for these masterpieces by Bach – they are not something to just fit in between other projects. I already had plans to record them in the 1990s, for Erato, and now that I finally am able to, it is for my own label. They were recorded in the trusted and beautiful-sounding Walloon Church in Amsterdam, with the famous recording duo of Tini Mathot and Adriaan Verstijnen, using my own Kroesbergen/Ruckers harpsichord and Werckmeister III tuning.

The Library of Congress possesses a printed copy of the Clavier-Übung that has Bach’s own handwritten notes and additions. There has been discussion about the meaning of these, but I think this copy gives definitive answers – these are corrections and additions made by Bach himself that do not appear in any modern editions of the partitas. Christoph Wolff talks about them in his introduction in this CD booklet. Significant, for example, is the addition in Bach’s hand to the second partita, in the transition in the sinfonia from its second to third section: there stands allegro, and a measure later, adagio. Until Christoph Wolff made this discovery, nobody knew what to do with these measures, and even now they are seldom or never played this way.