Suites for Keyboard is Keith Jarrett's recording of seven keyboard suites by Georg Friedrich Händel, played on the modern piano. It followed his run of ECM New Series albums devoted to Johann Sebastian Bach (the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Goldberg Variations and the French Suites). Here he turned to Bach's near contemporary, whose solo keyboard music Jarrett called "basically unknown". It was his first baroque album on piano rather than harpsichord since Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier in 1988. Its warm, singing slow movements sit closer to his improvised work than his Bach does.
Jarrett recorded the suites in September 1993 at the State University of New York in Purchase, with Peter Laenger as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. In his liner note he writes that he had first begun to record Händel's suites some twenty years earlier. He worked from "the least tampered with editions" in the interests of "correctness both musicological and musical". Yet he gave himself room in tempi and phrasing, feeling that this music needed some special pleading. "Händel was a keyboardist," he notes, "and his keyboard works should occupy a higher position in our awareness than they do."
The programme runs in more or less reverse chronological order. Four suites come from the collection Händel published in London in 1720 (HWV 426, 427, 429 and 433). They are joined by HWV 440 from the second collection and the less familiar HWV 447 and 452. The Suite in F major, HWV 427, follows an old four-movement plan of Adagio, Allegro, Adagio and Allegro. Jarrett lets its slow movements unfold like recitative before the closing fugue. The disc ends with the Suite in A major, HWV 426, which moves from a free Prélude to a quick, buoyant Gigue.
Reviewing the disc in The Christian Science Monitor in 1996, David Sterritt wrote that Jarrett "brings warmth and clarity to his performances". He also observed that Händel's keyboard music had long been overshadowed by the oratorios. Writing on ECM Reviews in 2010, Tyran Grillo went further: "This is Jarrett's finest Baroque recording on ECM." ECM set the album beside Jarrett's Dmitri Shostakovich (the 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87), which led John Rockwell of The New York Times to call him "a classical pianist of the first rank".
This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1530, first released in September 1995, with liner notes by Jarrett and Uwe Schweikert.
