Bach French Suites by Tilney on Clavichord

There is a school of thought — still surprisingly vigorous — that Bach’s French Suites are somehow lesser Bach, transitional pieces caught between the student exercises of the early keyboard works and the titanic architecture of the partitas. Colin Tilney’s new recording on Music & Arts makes short work of that idea.

Tilney plays a clavichord. Not a harpsichord, not a fortepiano, not a Steinway concert grand with the lid propped half-open. A clavichord — an 1895 Dolmetsch instrument built on the model of Johann Adolph Hass, the Hamburg maker whose instruments Bach himself would have known. The choice matters enormously, and not only for historical reasons.

The clavichord is, by any measure of the concert hall, nearly inaudible. Beethoven reportedly wept at one; later generations laughed. The instrument produces sound through a brass tangent that strikes the string and stays in contact with it — which means the player can actually inflect the pitch after the key goes down, bending and coloring the tone in ways no harpsichord can approach. Tilney calls this vibrato, and it is, in his hands, the instrument’s most intimate secret.

Intimacy. That’s the word that keeps returning. Bach assembled these suites around 1722, when he was freshly arrived in Köthen, navigating the competing demands of a new employer and a growing household — his second wife Anna Magdalena had just entered his life. The suites appear in the Clavier-Büchlein he assembled partly for her instruction. They are, in one sense, household music. Tilney plays them that way.

But “household” need not mean modest. In the Allemande of the Suite no. 4 in E flat major, Tilney achieves something remarkable: an expressiveness that never announces itself. The ornamentation falls without fuss, the lines breathe, the counterpoint opens outward the way a window opens onto a garden — you become aware of space rather than the act of opening. Plenty of keyboardists, on any instrument, would have made more of this movement. Tilney makes it feel inevitable.

His Courantes are darker than you might expect — not mournful, exactly, but weighted, as if each one carries knowledge of where it has been. This suits the clavichord’s shorter resonance, which prevents the blurring that can plague these dances on the harpsichord when the inner voices start to crowd one another. You hear the articulation because you must; Tilney’s finger craft is clean enough that nothing gets lost.

The Suite in g minor is, I think, where Tilney is most himself. There’s a lightness in his reading — a metric suppleness, the kind of thing you can’t really notate — that makes the dance idiom feel genuinely kinetic. He shifts the gravitational center of a phrase mid-stream, and suddenly the music is dancing rather than being performed. Small difference. Everything.

The recording also includes selected movements from two companion pieces, the Suite in E flat major, BWV 818a, and the Suite in a minor, BWV 818a — appendages, essentially, to the main sequence, but played with the same undemonstrative authority.

One caveat: the booklet sensibly warns that the clavichord demands close listening at a considered volume. This is not background music. It is not music for the dinner party, the commute, or the treadmill. Play it too loudly and you will hear surface noise before you hear Bach. Play it at the right level, in a quiet room, and you will hear something that sounds less like a rendition than a conversation — one that happens to have been composed three centuries ago by a man who understood the interior life of sound better than almost anyone before or since.

Tilney has been making records since the 1970s. He knows what he’s doing, and he knows what this instrument can do, and on this evidence the two things are the same thing. In a field crowded with brilliant harpsichordists and a growing army of fortepianists, a clavichord album of this quality and seriousness is a rarity worth protecting.