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GRAMOPHONE (04/2016)
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Decca 4788449



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Reviewer: Harriet Smith

This, Nelson Freire’s first disc devoted to Bach, is predictably personal. It speaks of long acquaintance with the works on offer and you only need to sample the Fourth Partita’s Sarabande to hear how lovingly he caresses the music, giving it a raptness that rivals Perahia. But there’s playfulness too, as witness the Menuet of the same work, and its Gigue has plenty of energy and exuberance while offering in its conception something slightly shaggier than Levit’s honed leonine energy.

Freire gives the opening Prelude of the Third English Suite a compelling urgency, compared to which Anderszewski lollops along. Swings and roundabouts, though, as the latter’s magnificently profound Sarabande is difficult to equal. Freire’s Gavottes, however, have a delicious spring in their step and he imbues the closing Gigue with energy yet a pleasing solidity too. If the C minor Toccata doesn’t quite have the febrile quality of Argerich’s masterly vision, in its place is a vivid sense of its arching architecture married to a simplicity of utterance, the final fugue dispatched with complete inevitability. Again, in the Chromatic Fantasia there are plenty more superficially brilliant accounts around, but few could match Freire in the Fugue, which is rich in tints and hues in his hands.

The remainder of the disc is devoted to arrangements, which suit Freire’s brand of pianism particularly well. Whether in the quiet solemnity of Bach’s own adaptation of the Adagio from Marcello’s D minor Oboe Concerto, the tolling depths of Busoni’s arrangement of Ich ruf zu dir or the majestic Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, there’s a rightness to everything he does. And to end, where else but the timeless Bach/Hess Jesu, joy? Joy indeed in Freire’s hands.

 

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