The high standards of stylish perception and pianistic finesse Murray Perahia brought to Bach’s Partitas Nos 2, 3 and 4 (7/08) happily inform Nos 1, 5 and 6, where beauty and strength merge as one. Perahia’s legato and detached articulations are always meaningful and tonally varied without exaggeration or contrivance, and each note of every ornament sings out with unforced exactitude. Repeats vary in regard to touch, voicings, accents, embellishments, but with discretion and the utmost in expressive economy. All of these virtues add up to one of the most thoughtful, well proportioned and fastidiously detailed B flat Partita accounts in recent memory, capped by an unusually loud yet unaggresive Gigue. Picture Glenn Gould’s razor-sharp contrapuntal fingerwork in bed with Edwin Fischer’s velvet paws (figuratively, not literally, I hasten to add!) to get the gist of the E minor Partita’s Tempo di Gavotta or the completely natural specificity with which Perahia apreggiates the Sarabande’s chords. Similar observations apply to the G major Partita.

Some might wish for more animation and point in the Allemande in the manner of András Schiff (Decca, 11/84), yet Perahia’s supreme command of the music’s conversational give-and-take more than justifies his lyrical, leisurely point of view. If you seek the Bach Partitas on piano in state-of-the-art sound, Perahia easily warrants top honours alongside Schiff’s first recording, Angela Hewitt (Hyperion, 6/97) and the underrated Zhu Xiao-Mei (Mandala).