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 are so excited about it. They promote the Chaconne as one of a family of giant chaconnes that would also include the Chaconne in Bach's sonata for unaccompanied violin in D minor. But the work, which has a lot of aimless passagework and unconvincing tempo shifts, isn't in that class. More convincing are the individual partita movements, with glittering ornamentation overlaid on the basic dance rhythms; Graupner was apparenlty quite a harpsichordist.
Akutagawa's performances are crisp and confident in the more difficult passages and appropriately majestic in tone. The sound, with
Wilson also serving as producer, is unusually good among Naxos recordings; it is resonant yet clear. Recommended for anybody who has ever wondered about Graupner.