A veteran Bach specialist continues his Bach odyssey on Brilliant Classics with a new recording of the English Suites.

Previous volumes in this series have met with wide critical acclaim. Of the French Suites, Jed Distler wrote in Classics Today: ‘a splendid new recording… these lovely performances memorably showcase Rübsam’s sensitive and poetic side.’ While Wolfgang Rübsam has been playing and recording Bach’s music for over half a century, he brings a fresh perspective, both to the works themselves and his approach to them, by performing on a lute-harpsichord, known in German as a lautenwerk.

Of the complete Well-Tempered Clavier, the Gramophone reviewer remarked: ‘Like his other Bach recordings using the Lautenwerk, including the French Suites, the so-called Lute Suites and beautiful arrangements of the Cello Suites and Violin Sonatas and Partitas, these are revelatory… one thing’s for certain: you’ll never listen to any of Bach’s music in the same way again.’

Bach himself owned a pair of Lautenwerk, and so Rübsam is returning this music to the scale on which it was conceived: more intimate than nearly all the competition on record, perfectly suited to close studio recording and domestic listening. The Suites themselves are hardly English in character (Bach probably wrote them for an English patron) but rather French, more developed in scale and expression than the earlier French Suites, especially in the Third and Sixth of the set.

Movements such as the Overture to No.2 and the Sarabande of No.3 have inspired some of the greatest keyboard musicians – on various instruments – to sound the depths of their artistry. Wolfgang Rübsam does so here, yet with a humility that draws the ear back to Bach himself, to the wondrous intricacy of his polyphony, and his particular genius for embodying the character of a dance through the natural shape of his melodies.