I saw Richard Egarr play Bach last night, Partitas 1, 4 and 6 and French Suite 5.
He’s a charmer and a comedian who talks to the audience about his ideas about the music. He’s fascinated by numerological ideas encoded in the scores, and by the emotional meaning attached to key signatures before the dominance of equal temperament. He talked at length about the strange publication history of the partitas. He talked about how Bach seemed to deliberately introduce imperfections (the quodlibet, the real meaning of the barred circle time signature . . . ) But most of all he talked about how in his opinion the 6th partita is a musical representation of Christ’s passion.
And you know what, as he was playing, those phrases in the toccata did sound like Jesus stumbling. And that final gigue did indeed sound bitter and angry. He emphasised the sheer strangeness of the 6th partita - a gigue which isn’t a gigue, a corrente which isn’t a corrente, an air you could never sing . . .
This renewed my interest in the music, and I intend to revisit the partitas on record soon.
I was struck by how less well the French suite worked as a concert piece. His Ruckers style instrument just didn’t seem to suit it. Maybe Egarr’s just more temperamentally suited to the partitas.
He’s a passionate musician at the top of his game. He's got a probing mind and he's curious -- that's something which I thought I sensed from his most innovative recordings like WTC and Goldberg Variations and Byrd, but hearing him speak and watching him play somehow confirmed that. You can see, sense, his involvement with the music as he plays, through his body language. There were times, many times, when we were all holding our breath with the wonder of it all.