Mahan Esfahani - Bach: The French Suites '2023

Tracks list

Tracklist

01. French Suite No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 812: I. Allemande
02. French Suite No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 812: II. Courante
03. French Suite No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 812: III. Sarabande
04. French Suite No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 812: IVa. Menuet I
05. French Suite No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 812: IVb. Menuet II
06. French Suite No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 812: IVc. Menuet I da capo
07. French Suite No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 812: V. Gigue
08. French Suite No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 813: I. Allemande
09. French Suite No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 813: II. Courante
10. French Suite No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 813: III. Sarabande
11. French Suite No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 813: IV. Air
12. French Suite No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 813: Va. Menuet I
13. French Suite No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 813: Vb. Menuet II
14. French Suite No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 813: Vc. Menuet I da capo
15. French Suite No. 2 in C Minor, BWV 813: VI. Gigue
16. French Suite No. 3 in B Minor, BWV 814: I. Allemande
17. French Suite No. 3 in B Minor, BWV 814: II. Courante
18. French Suite No. 3 in B Minor, BWV 814: III. Sarabande
19. French Suite No. 3 in B Minor, BWV 814: IV. Anglaise
20. French Suite No. 3 in B Minor, BWV 814: Va. Menuet
21. French Suite No. 3 in B Minor, BWV 814: Vb. Trio
22. French Suite No. 3 in B Minor, BWV 814: Vc. Menuet da capo
23. French Suite No. 3 in B Minor, BWV 814: VI. Gigue
24. Suite in E-Flat Major, BWV 819: I. Allemande
25. Suite in E-Flat Major, BWV 819: II. Courante
26. Suite in E-Flat Major, BWV 819: III. Sarabande
27. Suite in E-Flat Major, BWV 819: IV. Bourrée
28. Suite in E-Flat Major, BWV 819: Va. Menuet I
29. Suite in E-Flat Major, BWV 819: Vb. Menuet II
30. Suite in E-Flat Major, BWV 819: Vc. Menuet I da capo
31. Suite in G Minor, BWV 822: I. Ouverture
32. Suite in G Minor, BWV 822: II. Aria
33. Suite in G Minor, BWV 822: III. Gavotte en rondeau
34. Suite in G Minor, BWV 822: IV. Bourrée
35. Suite in G Minor, BWV 822: Va. Menuet I
36. Suite in G Minor, BWV 822: Vb. Menuet II
37. Suite in G Minor, BWV 822: Vc. Menuet I da capo
38. Suite in G Minor, BWV 822: VI. Gigue
39. French Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major, BWV 815a: I. Praeludium
40. French Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major, BWV 815a: II. Allemande
41. French Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major, BWV 815a: III. Courante
42. French Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major, BWV 815a: IV. Sarabande
43. French Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major, BWV 815a: V. Gavotte I
44. French Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major, BWV 815a: VI. Gavotte II
45. French Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major, BWV 815a: VII. Air
46. French Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major, BWV 815a: VIII. Menuet
47. French Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major, BWV 815a: IX. Gigue
48. French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816: I. Allemande
49. French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816: II. Courante
50. French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816: III. Sarabande
51. French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816: IV. Gavotte
52. French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816: V. Bourrée
53. French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816: VI. Loure
54. French Suite No. 5 in G Major, BWV 816: VII. Gigue
55. French Suite No. 6 in E Major, BWV 817: Ia. Prélude
56. French Suite No. 6 in E Major, BWV 817: Ib. Allemande
57. French Suite No. 6 in E Major, BWV 817: II. Courante
58. French Suite No. 6 in E Major, BWV 817: III. Sarabande
59. French Suite No. 6 in E Major, BWV 817: IV. Gavotte
60. French Suite No. 6 in E Major, BWV 817: V. Polonaise
61. French Suite No. 6 in E Major, BWV 817: VI. Bourrée
62. French Suite No. 6 in E Major, BWV 817: VII. Gigue
63. French Suite No. 6 in E Major, BWV 817: VIII. Menuet
64. Suite in A Minor, BWV 818: I. Fort gai
65. Suite in A Minor, BWV 818: II. Allemande
66. Suite in A Minor, BWV 818: III. Courante
67. Suite in A Minor, BWV 818: IV. Sarabande
68. Suite in A Minor, BWV 818: V. Sarabande simple - Sarabande double
69. Suite in A Minor, BWV 818: VII. Passepied
70. Suite in A Minor, BWV 818: VII. Gigue



Since the beginning of my endeavour to perform and record all the keyboard works
of J S Bach, I have been fascinated, perhaps to the point of exaggeration, by
the various scribal traditions and textual variants in the secondary
manuscripts, whether prepared under Bach’s supervision or by further
generations of students and disciples. One might call my interest the natural
outgrowth of a contrarian inclination towards problematizing everything, but I
do think that those who concern themselves with questions of performance
practice would do well to see in the various sources a more reliable body of
material for reflection and eventual practical application as opposed to the
notion that musical authenticity comes merely from a homogenized vocabulary of
stock gestures picked up from a few sources that rarely discuss actual pieces of
music.
Given all these textual issues, I shall nonetheless stop short of posing a
pseudo-clever question along the lines of ‘what is the work?’. Bach
and his contemporaries would have found this an irritating question (as do I),
but it does bear some consideration in terms of understanding the flexible
attitude of eighteenth-century musicians to the number of movements belonging to
a suite, the term ‘belonging’ obviously excluding the possibility
that the movements in question would apply to another collection generally
compiled under the genre title of ‘suite’. Why, in the case of
Bach’s French Suites, extra movements appear in the manuscripts from
Gerber’s hand is difficult to ascertain, as Gerber’s copies
suggest a possible scenario of having been written at home, with great care,
from now lost originals lent by Bach in his role as a teacher. Do these
movements represent otherwise lost pieces by Bach himself, or more likely could
they be collaborative pieces created during Gerber’s lessons wherein one
combined composition and improvisation? The latter course of events seems more
plausible given the tentative and somewhat pastiche-like nature of the Gerber
variants. Nonetheless, to dismiss them as not being by Bach—even if the
term ‘by Bach’ might include some element of
collaboration—would be to ignore the reception of his French Suites in
the early years of their existence.

I am aware that my decision to pick and choose textual variants and movements
effectively results in music that potentially never existed—e.g. the
recording of the E flat French Suite (BWV815) is effectively an omnibus suite of
movements from at least three different source traditions. But what I do think
it reveals is that, in the case of a given allemande or sarabande with several
versions and even whole phrases written with completely different melodies and
ideas (for instance, the sarabande from BWV816), in Bach’s mind the
concept of a piece depended on a fundamental idea whose integrity goes beyond
the minutiae of specific motifs or gestures.

As for the music itself, it would be a great error indeed to consider the French
Suites as somehow less substantial works than Bach’s larger essays in
this genre. Admittedly, the architectonics of such later works as the partitas
(BWV825-830) are complex and ambitious to the point of deconstructing the entire
Baroque suite genre, but the French Suites in no way suffer when placed next to
the more massive English Suites (BWV806-811) of several years before. In
general, the motifs and phrases of the French Suites are more concise and the
result of the distillation of craft that many a composer goes through in his
middle period. One is reminded in this instance of the tremendous artistic
transformation evident in Verdi’s style between the long-winded if
nonetheless inspired Nabucco (1841) and the shattering immediacy of Macbeth
(1847). This stylistically distinguishing characteristic of the suites is in any
case unlikely to be related to their being known as ‘French,’ a
moniker which most likely was adopted in common parlance to distinguish them
from the English Suites (referred to in one source as ‘faits pour les
Anglois’) and the partitas, which at some point in the nineteenth century
were known, inexplicably, as the ‘German Suites’. As with all three
of these suite collections, the compositional language is one of the basically
international style that came to define the Baroque keyboard suite, in which
Italian correnti coincide with French rigaudons and English hornpipes and even
the occasional polonaise.

Three orphan suites
Of all the works on this album, the G minor suite (BWV822) has the most tenuous
connection to J S Bach, as the work exists only in a single source from the
latter half of the eighteenth century which bears the pithy attribution
‘Bach’ as casually as famous names have always been written in
manuscripts of unclear authorship. One has only to consider certain absurd
attributions of works to Purcell (a toccata in A which is clearly a work from
north Germany) and Handel (of all things, the Toccata in G major, BWV916!) to
see how little one can trust such things without cross-checking with other
sources. To make matters worse, unlike other works where one can at least ask
‘who could write this work but Bach?’, the G minor suite is
somewhat lacking in the infallibly golden patina characterizing even the
earliest of Bach’s works.

Nonetheless, I have included this suite for two reasons: (a) in the event
another source turns up and confirms Bach’s authorship, I will at least
have recorded it, and more importantly (b) I find it a charming piece. Likewise,
there is little about the score itself that would lend credence to the claims of
some scholars that the piece might be a keyboard transcription of an orchestral
work—this is particularly the case with the opening ouverture, whose
modulations in the fugue, abounding in odd distant keys like G flat, hardly
suggest the usual keys found in contemporary orchestral music. The pair of
menuets in invertible counterpoint also suggest the inspiration of the keyboard
idiom and the sorts of compositional inside jokes of the north German organists.
Whole generations of Bach scholars seem to forget that an orchestral texture a
transcription does not make.

Inasmuch as Bach was given to compiling his music into multi-work sets, it is
interesting to find that the suites in A minor and E flat major (BWV818 and 819
respectively) were included in some of the sources alongside the French Suites.
Like the larger set, both lack surviving autographs, which makes reliable dating
well-nigh impossible. Having said that, the two-voiced structures and somewhat
static expressive architecture of the allemandes and courantes from both
resemble the sorts of French dance movements copied out in the Johann Christoph
Bach circle during the first decade of the eighteenth century; these collections
include suites by relatively minor composers like Nicolas Lebègue
(c1631-1702) and Louis Marchand (1669-1732).

In the absence of autographs, both suites present completely irreconcilable
textual issues. The A minor suite (BWV818) survives in two scribal
traditions—one from H N Gerber (c1725) and the other from the scribal
circle of J N Mempell (c1735-40). Whereas the Gerber MS has a sarabande in the
style brisé (the ‘broken style’ essentially, though not always,
imitating the lute and sustaining the harpsichord’s singing voice) along
with an elaborate double (‘variation’) in two voices, the scribe
from the Mempell tradition gives a single sarabande with the same harmonic
structure but in a rather more monumental and angular texture; no scenario can
be established to explain this discrepancy unless one imagines the later copyist
somehow discarding the idea of a dance and variation in favour of a
‘definitive’ sarabande. I have chosen to play all three forms of
the sarabande, in addition to the remarkably symphonic and rather Classical
‘Fort gai’ (again from Mempell) that opens the later manuscript of
the suite, as well as a curious movement in 3/8, labelled in the source as a
menuet, but which more likely resembles the rhythms and metre of a passepied.
The E flat suite (BWV819) has an even more curious discrepancy with regard to
the allemande. Whilst the manuscripts of Gerber and Bernhard Christian Kayser
and their various subsidiary copyists have the same basic text for this
movement, a single source—by Johann Caspar Vogler (c1725, D-B Mus.ms.
Bach P 420)—contains a highly chromatic text which seems to emanate in
some way from the melodic contours suggested in the other sources. I am pleased
that my intuitive feelings that Vogler’s text must represent some sort of
double, improvised or otherwise, on Bach’s original have been
independently confirmed with considerable scholarly insight by the Bach
Archiv’s Ulrich Leisinger, in a paper delivered at the April 2000 meeting
of the American Bach Society: ‘The riddle of two allemandes in BWV819/819a
and Kirnberger’s method of tossing off sonatas’. The present
recording has the text from the Vogler MS in the repeats of each half of the
allemande, which I realize again presents a text possibly unknown within the
context of a single performance such as it would have been known to Bach. This
is where the art of recording can achieve something wholly separate from the
restrictions of performance or indeed the binary value judgements of philology.

Performance note
The effort to definitively assign certain works by J S Bach to the clavichord or
harpsichord started in the late nineteenth century, reaching fever pitch in
Erwin Bodky’s pointless and bizarre Interpretation of Bach’s
keyboard works (1960). I personally have never been able to make heads or tails
of most of the argumentation from either camp, and from personal experience I
can say that the fundamentals of one’s interpretation may remain constant
whilst giving way to certain idiosyncrasies depending on the medium at hand. I
play the harpsichord during the day, whilst at night-time, following dinner and
perhaps a glass or two of something, I sit at the clavichord and commune with
the composer as though he were sitting next to me. I have recorded the first
three of the French Suites and the two suites in A minor and E flat major on the
clavichord because this is generally how I play them at home, though in my ears
(particularly in the ‘Fort gai’ of BWV818) I may occasionally hear
the rich snarl of the harpsichord. Likewise, though I’ve recorded the
latter three of the French Suites on harpsichord, I cannot deny that the best of
my playing most likely emanates from what I have learned at the clavichord.

In contrast to my recordings of the first two books of Clavier-Ãœbung
(Hyperion CDA68311/2 and CDA68336), rather than replicating to the letter of the
law, so to speak, the ornaments found in this source or that, I found that I
came to internalize each scribe’s vocabulary of embellishment to the
extent that I felt it elucidated what was in the music itself. The preponderance
throughout the Gerber manuscript tradition of ports de voix culminating in a
pincé I found to be rather more effective at the clavichord, where they gave
a greater sense of vocality at the instrument; as with most of the French
agréments, this has as its basis the rise and fall of the human voice and the
use of dissonance and minuscule gradations in pitch. One can still hear this in
the somewhat approximate tuning of most French orchestral playing which in its
better moments can be charitably described as expressive.



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