Almost a year after it started, András Schiff’s Bach project in New York is finally coming to its conclusion. He began on the Upper East Side, at 92Y, with both books of The Well-Tempered Clavier. His performance of Book I, I wrote, was “of the highest quality and depth of thought”. Hurricane Sandy split the two concerts, and after the waters subsided Schiff was on more monastic form for Book II, in a recital that “felt just plain wrong, almost voyeuristic” in its “purgative, deeply personal flavor”. The complete English Suites followed at Lincoln Center, as well as a a concert of concertos with the New York Philharmonic, and a mammoth evening of the French Suite, the Overture in the French Style, and the entire Italian Concerto as an encore. And so, at last, to Carnegie Hall, and the six Partitas.
Schiff has been performing the Partitas as a group for many years now, and indeed a recording, his second of these works, appeared in 2009. These concerts are tremendous feats of stamina, and this one lasted for nearly three hours. He rearranges the ordering to perform them out of sequence, but in a way that makes sense. Performing them not 1-2-3-4-5-6 but 5-3-1-2-4-6, with an interval after the Second, not only provides a satisfying rise through the keys (G-A minor-B flat-C minor-D-E minor), but allows the two more exercise-like works to pass as preparation for the intimacy of the often overlooked First. More impressively, everything builds up in a natural emotional progression, ending the first half with the terrorising Second, and pairing the two largest works, the Fourth and Sixth, to make a satisfying denouement.
Schiff used to be a very idiosyncratic player of Bach, although given how particular these works are to each and any pianist, idiosyncracy is even more subjective a judgment than usual. Schiff’s skills in this music are immense, the product of a lifetime’s devotion to the composer and a complexity and intensity of lateral thinking about not just his piano works, but his whole oeuvre. Famously, Schiff dares not touch the sustaining pedal in Bach – except for one note in one of the books of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Usually that does not matter, and it has the benefits of clarity and rigour, as well as allowing an appreciation of Schiff’s natural facility of touch. Even more here than in his concerts of the suites, this Bach was freely ornamented too, so much so that it became difficult to distinguish between the incidental, the ornamental, and the fundamental. That, nevertheless, is the point of trills and turns, and Schiff delights with the unexpected: experimentation and interpretation are one. Question is, when does the unexpected simply become mannered or eccentric?