Johann Sebastian Bach was the Leipzig city council's third choice to become cantor at the Thomaskirche, hired only after being turned down by Telemann first and then Johann Christoph Graupner. Despite the fame of this event, Graupner's music (and there is a lot of it in German libraries) remains little known, even to scholars. This disc of keyboard music is thus welcome, and indeed it reveals some music with the imposing, monumental tone of Bach's own. The program consists of a group of partitas for harpsichord that are ...
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Johann Sebastian Bach was the Leipzig city council's third choice to become cantor at the Thomaskirche, hired only after being turned down by Telemann first and then Johann Christoph Graupner. Despite the fame of this event, Graupner's music (and there is a lot of it in German libraries) remains little known, even to scholars. This disc of keyboard music is thus welcome, and indeed it reveals some music with the imposing, monumental tone of Bach's own. The program consists of a group of partitas for harpsichord that are close to Bach's partitas in spirit, plus a Chaconne in A major that was originally part of one of the partitas that has been detached by the performer, Japanese-German harpsichordist Naoko Akutagawa, and her annotator and mentor Glen Wilson. The reason given for separating the Chaconne out -- that it makes for an outsized partita -- is not particularly convincing, and despite the stress laid on this work in the booklet and in Naxos' publicity, it's hard to see why Akutagawa and Wilson...
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