The musical distinction gracing Jory Vinikour’s Bach Partitas should come as no surprise to listeners familiar with this sensitive and cultivated musician. For starters, he gets superb engineering courtesy of Sono Luminus’ home base studios in Boyce, Virginia. The sonics envelop Vinikour’s harpsichord (a 1995 double-manual German model by Thomas and Barbara Wolf, based on a 1738 vintage single-manual instrument by Christian Vater) within a warm, ample, and resonant ambience, with a special ring to sustained bass notes and clarity in all registers. Secondly, Vinikour’s aesthetic evokes that of his late mentor Huguette Dreyfus for its generally conservative tempos and a subtle approach to agogic phrasing that avoids the rhythmic hiccups and lurching mannerisms that we too often hear in the name of “authenticity”.
He never plays faster than one can dance or sing, as the gently ebullient Gigue finales demonstrate, while being quite generous with ornaments and embellishments on the repeats. If the A minor and G major Allemandes tend to sag under their expansive weight, the opposite is true in the D major Allemande’s gorgeously spun legato lines and sustaining power. This Partita’s opening Ouverture, incidentally, receives one of its finest performances on disc; it manages to sound weightily grandiose without sacrificing any forward sweep.
Also worth mentioning are Vinikour’s articulation of the E minor Corrente’s suspended syncopations and his opting to take the Gigue in triple rather than duple meter. Vinikour’s absorption in and commitment to these scores proves further evident in his booklet notes, which are highly informative and vividly expressed. I wouldn’t want to be without Christophe Rousset’s generally brisker pacing, the greater variety of registrations and timbres that Trevor Pinnock serves up in his Hänssler Bach Edition remake, or the late Igor Kipnis’ irrepressible sense of character. Yet Vinikour’s Partitas add up to a serious and major achievement by a serious and major artist.
