Your guide to classical music online

Egarr’s Excellent English Suites

Jed Distler

Artistic Quality:

Sound Quality:

The English Suites constitute Richard Egarr’s most artistically satisfying solo Bach release to date. As always, his playing abounds with rhythmic liberties and agogic phrasings, yet they rarely pull focus from the music’s dance origins.

The Fourth suite’s Courante, for example, has a swinging resilience not always evident in other period performances. Egarr also lays into the big chords of the Third suite Prelude in a manner that projects both the movement’s gravitas and churning intensity. A similar observation applies to the Sixth suite’s first Gavotte, which is followed by a second one whose higher octave registration manages not to sound the least bit cloying. Egarr’s beautifully contoured dialoguing between the hands in the Fifth suite’s Allemande justifies a tempo that might appear marginally too slow on first hearing. Conversely, I applaud Egarr’s refusal to rush the Gigues, where his centered basic pulse and eloquent melodic articulation allow these movements to both sing and dance.

The gentle colors characterizing the Katzman harpsichord’s quill plectra register beautifully via Harmonia Mundi’s engineering and are entirely appropriate to Egarr’s interpretations, which convincingly complement Christophe Rousset’s more extroverted and imposingly resonant traversals. Recommended.


Recording Details:

Reference Recording: Rousset (Ambroisie); Leonhardt (Virgin Classics)

Search Music Reviews

Search Sponsor

  • Insider Reviews only
  • Click here for Search Tips

Visit Our Merchandise Store

Visit Store
  • Ideally Cast Met Revival of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette
    Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, NY; March 19, 2024—The Met has revived Bartlett Sher’s 1967 production of Gounod’s R&J hot on the heels of its
  • An Ozawa Story, November, 1969
    Much has justifiably been written regarding Seiji Ozawa’s extraordinary abilities and achievements as a conductor, and similarly about his generosity, graciousness, and sense of humor
  • Arvo Pärt’s Passio At St. John The Divine
    Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York, NY; January 26, 2024—When one thinks of musical settings of Christ’s Passion, one normally thinks of the