All four works offered here are among Bach’s most popular and frequently recorded keyboard compositions. Though Pieter-Jan Belder faces plenty of competition, even at Brilliant Classics’ budget price, given the brilliance (no pun intended) of these masterworks it’s certainly understandable why a young, aspiring performer would rise to the opportunity. And on the whole Belder’s performances are fine. His renderings of Bach’s more expressively extreme passages work best–such as in the lucid, swift runs of the Chromatic Fantasy and in many of the slow, elegant passages of the French Overture. At times, however, Belder’s performance suffers from some of the same habitual mannerisms that beset his teacher, Bob van Asperen, who often adopts an unduly rigid, heavy-handed approach when tempos and rhythms aren’t clearly defined. For instance, throughout his performance of the Goldberg Variations, Belder lacks the dexterity of the finest interpreters, his counterpoint often inordinately square and lyrically restrained.
Listeners seeking the best harpsichord performances of these seminal works would do well to seek out the following: for the Italian Concerto, Rousset (L’Oiseau-Lyre), Leonhardt (Sony SEON), Kipnis (EMI Seraphim), and Koopman (Erato) deliver top-drawer excellence; in the French Overture, the same can be said for Verlet (Philips) and Kipnis; Masaaki Suzuki (BIS) and Verlet (this time for Astrée) offer stunning, beautifully recorded performances of the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue; and for the prodigious Goldberg’s, go with Hantai (Naïve), Vartolo (Tactus), Le Gaillard (Le Chant du Monde–one of the finest sounding harpsichord recordings ever made), and Kipnis. In fact, if you’re willing to forego BWV 903 and want world-class performances of everything else Belder offers at nearly the same price, Kipnis’ two-CD budget-priced EMI set is a remarkable value.
