Bach: The 6 Partitas

“When I was a little boy, I fell in love with J.S. Bach,” remembers Francesco Tristano. “The polyphony and the groove and all these Baroque dances made my body move pretty much in the same way as when I listened to some popular music.” So much so that the then seven-year-old pianist insisted that he would play Bach and his own compositions, to the exclusion of all other music. “My teacher said, ‘That’s very sweet and very cute, but you don't know 95 per cent of the piano repertoire. There’s Debussy, there’s Mozart, there’s this whole bunch of stuff.’” Tristano’s glittering music career has, of course, since taken in a wide variety of repertoire, from Tudor keyboard gems to Prokofiev, Ravel, John Cage and his own kaleidoscopic, Baroque-influenced piano pieces. But it’s Bach’s colossal gravitational pull that constantly draws him back to the studio, including a scintillating Goldberg Variations in 2010 and, in 2023, compellingly original accounts of the keyboard concertos. “Bach is all you need,” says Tristano. “It’s a daily bread kind of thing. It’s very difficult for me to do anything else but play Bach first thing in the morning.” The Six Partitas make up the first album of Tristano’s planned project to record all Bach’s solo keyboard music on his own label, intothefuture (following a physical-only soft-launch of the English Suites in Japan in 2023). If this release is anything to go by, the completed set will be one of the most thrilling ever recorded. From the graceful opening “Prelude” of Partita No. 1 to the angular, almost modernist “Gigue” of No. 6, Tristano articulates every note with a gleaming precision, matched by a natural sense of phrasing and musical shape. Each movement has a clearly defined character, yet the clarity of the playing (“I don’t use the sustaining pedal—I think it gets in the way,” Tristano reveals) brings us up-close and personal to the inner workings of Bach’s music. Composed around 1725-31, the Partitas were the first of Bach’s wo