Bach: The 6 Partitas

“When I was a little boy, I fell in love with J.S. Bach,” remembers Francesco Tristano. “The polyphony and the groove and all these Baroque dances made my body move pretty much in the same way as when I listened to some popular music.” So much so that the then seven-year-old pianist insisted that he would play Bach and his own compositions, to the exclusion of all other music. “My teacher said, ‘That’s very sweet and very cute, but you don't know 95 per cent of the piano repertoire. There’s Debussy, there’s Mozart, there’s this whole bunch of stuff.’” Tristano’s glittering music career has, of course, since taken in a wide variety of repertoire, from Tudor keyboard gems to Prokofiev, Ravel, John Cage and his own kaleidoscopic, Baroque-influenced piano pieces. But it’s Bach’s colossal gravitational pull that constantly draws him back to the studio, including a scintillating Goldberg Variations in 2010 and, in 2023, compellingly original accounts of the keyboard concertos. “Bach is all you need,” says Tristano. “It’s a daily bread kind of thing. It’s very difficult for me to do anything else but play Bach first thing in the morning.” The Six Partitas make up the first album of Tristano’s planned project to record all Bach’s solo keyboard music on his own label, intothefuture (following a physical-only soft-launch of the English Suites in Japan in 2023). If this release is anything to go by, the completed set will be one of the most thrilling ever recorded. From the graceful opening “Prelude” of Partita No. 1 to the angular, almost modernist “Gigue” of No. 6, Tristano articulates every note with a gleaming precision, matched by a natural sense of phrasing and musical shape. Each movement has a clearly defined character, yet the clarity of the playing (“I don’t use the sustaining pedal—I think it gets in the way,” Tristano reveals) brings us up-close and personal to the inner workings of Bach’s music. Composed around 1725-31, the Partitas were the first of Bach’s works to be published. They formed the first part of his Clavier-Übung (keyboard practice), aimed at accomplished amateur musicians for them to improve their technical and musical skills. “The six Partitas are clearly pedagogical because there’s a very clear development from the first through the sixth,” says Tristano. “Take, for example, the sarabandes. The first Sarabande, in B-flat major, is classic—in a Baroque style with accents on the second beat, as the dance was originally intended. By the time you get to the sixth Partita, its Sarabande is very unclear, very abstract. It’s like he’s forming his own take on the sarabande form. They get more and more complex as we progress.” The Partitas, adds Tristano, are as varied and different as Bach’s music gets. “No. 2 has some of the most amazing rhythmic work—the ‘Rondeaux’ and the ‘Capriccio’ are super bouncy and super groovy. It's a lot of fun to play them on the keyboard. The Sixth Partita is a trip in itself. It’s very intense and so rich in emotions. And by the time you get to the last movement, you have gone through pretty much all states of the human condition. The Fifth is the least played, and was Glenn Gould's favourite. I can see why. There aren’t many pieces that resemble the Fifth in Bach's music: there is some very interesting rhythmic work and moments of humour.” Perhaps, he muses, Bach’s intention to publish the Partitas had as much to do with securing his music for generations to come as it was about serving the musicians of his day. “Bach maybe wanted to project his own music into the future. Printing music was a relatively new technology, and he wanted to be part of it. Bach was very much up to date with the technologies of his day, namely the printing press and organ building, the most complex form of instrument manufacture of the Baroque era.” It’s this very idea that has sparked the name “intothefuture”—using the latest technology to preserve Bach’s works for posterity. For this album, Tristano used a prototype of a Yamaha CFX grand piano. “It’s probably the best piano I’ve played in my life,” he says, “with this very bright and very rich high register. It has a lot of substance.” Combined with the work of Christoph Frommen, one of the most detailed and fastidious of recording engineers, Tristano’s recording possesses an arresting vitality that preserves something of the rough-edged graininess of a harpsichord or clavichord. The results have delighted Tristano: “I’m really happy with the way it sounds, I have to say.” Inside the Album Booklet Tristano’s written introduction, in which he articulates his love of Bach as well as his passion for this recording process, is presented alongside a selection of abstract photographs. Album booklets are available in the latest version of Apple Music Classical, which you can download and enjoy as part of your Apple Music subscription. To access booklets, tap on the book icon at the top of your screen.