The French Suites have a special place among Bach’s keyboard works. Besides containing music as profound and poetic as any he wrote, their textures have a transparency and sparkle that reflect a move towards the galant style fashionable among Bach’s contemporaries. In this, the third instalment of Peter Hill’s acclaimed Bach series, Hill has chosen to follow the suites with his own completion of Mozart’s Suite in C, K399.
With Bach and Handel as his models, this work epitomises Mozart’s fascination with Baroque music. Hill’s celebrated return to the studio with Delphian four years ago continues to reap rich artistic rewards, with a ‘Diapason d’Or’ and a recent Gramophone Award nomination for his premiere recording of Messiaen’s rediscovered La Fauvette passerinette. Here in Bach, too, his abundant energy and passion are deeply informed by a lifetime of scholarship.