Bach’s keyboard music is so rich, writes Fritz Siebert in the booklet, that any selection will always seem somewhat arbitrary; he has therefore chosen forms that are exemplary for Bach. The seven manualiter toccatas BWV 910–916 stand in the shadow of the well-known pedaliter toccatas, yet they were written for the same instruments: harpsichord or clavichord, with or without pedal, on which organists practised, since playing the church organ required several calcants. Their models were the North German organ prelude and the twelve toccatas of Georg Muffat’s “Apparatus musico-organisticus”. The toccatas, among them the Toccata in D major BWV 912, survive only in copies, were written between 1705 and 1709 and combine passages in the stylus fantasticus with arioso, concerto movements and fugues.
The Suite in E minor “aufs LautenWerck” BWV 996 has come down to us in a copy by Johann Gottfried Walther that points to Bach’s Weimar years. The lautenwerck was a harpsichord strung with gut instead of iron or brass, close to the sound of the lute and, because of its low volume, a favourite instrument for practice and domestic music-making. The Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV 894 probably dates from around 1713/14, when Bach was court organist in Weimar; both movements later became the outer movements of the Triple Concerto in A minor BWV 1044. Bach uses a many-sectioned ritornello form modelled on Tomaso Albinoni rather than Antonio Lucio Vivaldi: the Prelude culminates in a cadenza of demisemiquaver runs, and in the Fugue in 12/16 time the subject dominates so strongly that real countersubjects hardly arise.
The Partita No. 4 in D major BWV 828 comes from the first part of the Clavier-Übung, Bach’s very first publication. From 1726 he issued the six partitas individually at his own expense, collected in 1731, “Denen Liebhabern zur Gemüths Ergoetzung” and thus also for a middle class keen on domestic music. Points of reference were Johann Kuhnau’s “Neue Clavier Übung” and probably Georg Friedrich Händel’s “Suites de Pièces pour le Clavecin” of 1720. In the mixed taste the dances approach the character piece: the Ouverture sets a fugue in the Italian style against a French overture, and most of the gigues of the partitas are at the same time fugues in two sections.
Fritz Siebert studied harpsichord with Zvi Meniker in Hanover, with Ketil Haugsand in Cologne and with Christian Rieger at the Folkwang-Hochschule Essen, where he took his concert diploma in 2007. Until 2013 he was harpsichordist of the Cologne ensemble NeoBarock; in 2010 he founded the concert series TASTENMUSIK in Hanover, and in 2013 he twice performed all four parts of the Clavier-Übung. He recorded the programme from 30 March to 1 April 2015 at the Kirchenzentrum Kronsberg on a harpsichord built by Burkhard Zander in Deutz am Rhein in 1999 after Ruckers/Couchet (Antwerp, mid-17th century). The recording was on the longlist 1/2016 of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik.