Georg Friedrich Händel published his eight “great” keyboard suites, HWV 426-433, himself in 1720. The collection gathers music from his Hamburg and English years and is among the most important of his early works, yet it is rarely brought together on disc. Lisa Smirnova made her ECM New Series debut with all eight, played on a modern piano. Händel's early biographer John Mainwaring wrote that “few persons are capable of doing them justice”, given the fullness and activity of their inner parts.
The recordings were made at Schloss Goldegg in Austria between June 2007 and February 2009, with Jens Jamin as engineer. Smirnova, born in Moscow, counts the pianist and early keyboard specialist Robert Levin among her teachers, and she had worked on the suites for five years before recording them. She wrote one of the booklet essays, alongside Uwe Schweikert. The cover photograph is by Jan Jedlička, and the booklet reproduces a facsimile from the Stiftung Händel-Haus.
The suites do not appear in numerical order. The first disc runs through Suites 2, 8, 4 and 5. It ends with the air and five doubles of the E major Suite, known as the Harmonious Blacksmith. The second gathers Suites 3, 6, 1 and 7 and closes on the Passacaille of the G minor Suite. In The Independent, Andy Gill noted that the Second Suite “opens with the most startlingly delicate of trills”. Smirnova keeps the many allemandes, courantes, sarabandes and gigues distinct from one another, and her pedalling stays light enough to keep the part-writing clear.
For BBC Music Magazine, Paul Riley called the suites “a treasure trove of Handelian wit and humanity”. He observed that Smirnova engages with period practice without being bound by it. Martin Wilkening in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung heard the variations of the Fifth Suite as the fine mechanism of a clockwork, the most fluent reading among recent recordings. Dominy Clements of MusicWeb International wrote in 2012 that, as a complete set on modern piano, it has no rivals.
Double CD on ECM New Series, ECM New Series 2213/14, first released in November 2011, with booklet notes in German and English.
