Craig Sheppard Plays Bach's Inventions & Sinfonias

The classical record magazines have been pouring forth encomia for Craig Sheppard, a pianist particularly known for his J.S. Bach recordings taken down at live recitals.  To see what all the excitement was about, I ordered a copy of his concert recording of the Inventions & Sinfonias by J.S. Bach.  Bach wrote these two and three-voice contrapuntal exercises as teaching materials, and the idea that anybody would play through all thirty pieces (about 45-50 minutes) in a continuous concert sequence would probably have struck him as daft.  But Sheppard did it one evening in 2006, and the results are extraordinary.

I have rarely heard Bach played with such dramatic sureness and sense of meaning by a keyboard artist.  This is one of the most interesting and moving piano recordings I've heard in a long time.  The audience is suitably quiet, the sound quality is fine, and the performance just blew me away.  I can't recommend this one highly enough.  Some searching may be in order, because it's on an obscure independent label, Romeo, but it's worth searching out.