Some charming playing here from California-born, Paris-based harpsichordist Lillian Gordis, and what’s perhaps even more special is how much it leaves one thinking. There’s a generous amount of chew and elasticity to the Partita No 1 in B flat that opens the first disc. Take the Allemande: Gordis plays with so much agogic sway that it’s as if the music has a wriggling life of its own. I particularly enjoy the care with which Gordis touches the low Gs in bars 28 and 29 – the non-alignment of these first beats is extremely sexy – and the harpsichord practically purrs in majesty. But what we gain in meandering introspection, we lose in dynamism. When Gordis navigates the repeat of the first section, there’s little or no sense of propulsion. Indeed, I’m not sure why we gain so much time at the three instances of navigating the double bars. Gone is all sense of the ‘common’ C time signature. It’s an interesting effect, certainly, one that unambiguously breathes the binary structure of the movement. This listener, however, desires a large-scale logic that transgresses page-breaks.
The following movement, the Corrente, has exactly what I desire for the Allemande. Gordis creates a wash of sound that is somehow still cleanly articulated, and her playing flows with unhurried momentum. Its end is entirely lovely – if not slightly cheeky in its palpable delay of the penultimate (anticipatory) note.
This plain-talking feistiness colours many moments. The English Suite No 5 in E minor is incredibly difficult music to commit to disc. Gordis’s performance of the Prelude is impressive: the different figurations are well characterised, and I love the syncopated, flick-of-the-hair emphasis on the second quaver beat of the bar. Such details breathe necessary freshness into what is an extremely wrought contrapuntal structure. The whole thing feels far more epic than its duration of 5'11" would suggest.
The final movement of the Suite, the Gigue, however, is not quite as successful. Bach’s complex texture requires a touch that does not amplify its tangled aspects. The moments of extreme rubato, while just about intelligible, do not help to elucidate what is already very difficult music to follow.