NEW RECORDING OF BACH ENGLISH SUITES FROM VIRTUOSO LONDON BASED HARPSICHORDIST CAROLE CERASI
Listen to a sample of Suite No.1 in A Major BWV806
Carole Cerasi releases a new complete recording of the English Suites by J. S.Bach in a 2 CD set on the Metronome label. The release of this celebrated collection of works for harpsichord coincides with her imminent performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the 2007 Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester on 4th August.
The English Suites are the earliest of Bach’s three major collections of keyboard Suites. They were written in Weimar between 1708 and 1717 and are considerably more technically demanding than anything that had been written for harpsichord before in Germany. It is not known exactly why they are called “English”: a copy once in the possession of his son J.C.Bach – the London Bach is headed “pour les Anglois”, but a more likely explanation is that they follow a suite form established by the composer Dieupart, who settled in London in 1700, and thus known to Bach as English.
Cerasi has previously released six recordings on Metronome. With her first release – the music of Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (MET CD 1026) - Cerasi won the Gramophone Award, and her subsequent recordings of music by CPE Bach and Thomas Tomkins were both awarded the Diapason D’Or D’Année. Her previous recording of the work of Bach for harpsichord explored the lesser known works of Bach and his contemporaries in the Möller Manuscript (MET CD 1055)
In April 2007 she has been touring in the United States and in May 2007 she gave a recital at the Lufthansa Baroque Festival in London of the music of Domenico Scarlatti and Blasco de Nebra to whose music she devoted her most recent recording (MET CD 1064).
“Carole Cerasi's exquisite recital of Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas, laced with Scarlatti-influenced works by Manuel Blasco de Nebra, Thomas Roseingrave, Antonio Soler, and Mateo Pérez de Albéniz, underlined how very rarely one hears these brief but deeply odd works played with real beauty of line, and how much more effective legato is when employed on an instrument that appears to militate against it.” (Independent on Sunday)
“Cerasi expertly showed off the virtuosic mastery of the Spanish idiom” (Early Music Today)
