Richard Goode

Bach: Partitas Nos. 1, 3, & 6

About this Album

“**** Exquisite renditions …There is no other performer who can make Bach’s music ring out on the piano with such lean and sinewy strength, such blinding translucence or such tender grace … His artistry is that rare blend in which a probing analytical intelligence is joined to a profound mastery of tone, color and phrasing.” —San Francisco Chronicle, on Goode’s Bach Partitas Nos. 2, 4 and 5

For more than 20 years, Richard Goode has kept the music of Bach an active part of his concert repertory. But it was not until 1999 that he committed any of the composer’s music to recording, with the release of Bach’s Partitas Nos. 2, 4, and 5 on Nonesuch. The results placed him on the cover of Gramophone magazine for the first time in his career and garnered great critical acclaim, including Washington Post writer Philip Kennicott's calling the performances “second to none.”

This second Goode collection of Bach works completes the set of six Partitas with BWV nos. 825, 827, and 830. Together they constitute Bach’s official Opus One, published when he was in his 40s. Bach went on to write 30 such sets of these dance music suites, an exceptionally popular genre at the time, and it could be argued that these are compositionally the most ambitious and richest of them all. Partita No. 6 is regarded, along with the Goldberg Variations and Chromatic Variations, as the peak of his writing for solo harpsichord.