Richard Goode

Bach: Partitas Nos. 2, 4, & 5

About this Album

For over 20 years, Richard Goode has kept the music of Bach an active part of his concert repertory. Here he brings the music to recording for the first time in his career, in an album featuring three of the composer’s partitas.

Goode, the first American to record all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, spent a long sabbatical in 1995 immersed in Bach and Chopin. (His Chopin recital disc was released in October 1997.) Only after this did he feel ready to enter the studio. In performance, his approach to the C-minor partita has been called “a small miracle of sensitivity, expression and nuance” by the Los Angeles Times, and to the G Major, “utterly appropriate to a work that conveys sheer joy in virtuosity.” (New York Times)

Published by Bach as a set of six in 1731 and collectively assigned the opus number 1, the partitas were conceived as a suite of dances—one of the most popular genres of instrumental music at the time. Forkel, Bach’s first biographer, wrote in 1802 that these works “made a great noise in the music world ... Keyboard compositions of such excellence ...a nyone who learned to perform some of their movements well could make his fortune in the world.”