After November 2024’s ‘Bach: The 6 Partitas’, the first instalment of theexploration of the music of JS Bach that the Luxembourg pianist Francesco Tristano has been undertaking for the last three years, naïve now publish‘Bach: The 6 English Suites’.

Recorded in December 2022, they actually constitute the starting point of this project, which will continue in a few months with the seven Toccatas (Autumn 2025) and the six French Suites (2026). This double album offers a new series of magnificent photographs by Breno Rotatori: nocturnal hues, midnight blue and vermilion yellow now replace thelively blood-red-orange of the Partitas.

For Francesco Tristano, Bach is a master of the groove, his writing has flow.The pianist’s modus operandi? Immerse yourself in it as you dive into deepwater: you breathe in, and you only breathe out when you come back up.

Despite their title, the six English Suites reveal no trace of keyboard music byBritish musicians who predated Bach, such as Orlando Gibbons, William Byrd or John Bull. A handwritten copy owned by Johann Christian Bach (1732-1795) bears the note ‘made for the English’, a note that was taken up in 1802 by his father’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel.

These works probably date, in their very first version, from the years 1713-1714: JS Bach, approaching his thirties, was then officiating at the chapel ofthe Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and more likely intended them for his studentswho, over the course of the set, were thus introduced to the genre of the French suite.