Eleonor Bindman’s Bach: Partitas recording makes an appearance in Fanfare Magazine’s “Not To Be Missed” section after a rave review from Raymond Tuttle:
“Bindman takes issue with performers who speed through this music—and there are plenty of them. Their work is impressive on a technical level, but not always musically illuminating. It’s not that she can’t; she plays difficult movements like the Gigue from Partita No. 4 at a lively tempo indeed, and the results are clean and exciting, but in many other movements her tempos are unusually slow, yet not excessively so, and her loving attention to the sound of every note and to the shape of every phrase fends off a listener’s potential impatience. If I had to describe these performances in a single word, that word would be “affectionate.” Bindman clearly loves this music, and she plays it caressingly, as a lover would. She eschews playing the music metronomically, and she liberates it from the strict rhythms that make Bach’s partitas beneficial for developing piano students who are trying to learn discipline, but that threaten to sap the character from the music. As an example, I’d like to point to the aforementioned Sarabande from Partita No. 3, which, under Bindman’s fingers, becomes an absolutely hypnotizing and eloquently grave meditation on the expressive power of 16th-note triplets. This is why we listen to new recordings of music we love—to shine a light on it of which we had not previously been aware.… This release excited my admiration from the moment I started playing it, and that attention has not waned over the course of more than a week. This could be on my Want List at the end of the year.”
—Raymond Tuttle, Fanfare Magazine
See the full review on FanfareArchive.com
