KEY POINTS:
One of the rewards of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos is that musicians can constantly uncover new joys and perspectives in their diversities.
Trevor Pinnock has returned to them on a new Avie double CD, a quarter-century after recording what many feel is one of the definitive sets with his English Concert.
The 60-year-old harpsichordist and conductor now sees Bach as a subversive, daring force, enlisting the crème de la crème of the Early Music set in the European Brandenburg Ensemble to prove his case.
The ensemble, which ranges from 1980s colleague, violist Jane Rogers, to the young Maltese horn player Etienne Cutajar, is juggled around the stage from concerto to concerto, crisply caught in the resonant acoustics of the Sheffield Town Hall Ballroom.
From the bracing instrumental mélange of the First Concerto, with its nicely pungent Adagio, Pinnock is aiming at the celebratory as much as the cerebral.
Highlights are many.
One is David Blackadder's trumpet soaring atop a striding Second Concerto even if the quartet of the piece's Andante doesn't quite spin the magic that Katy Bircher, Beatrice Hulsemann and Pinnock release in the flute, violin and harpsichord solos of the Fifth Concerto.
If Pinnock captures Bach in a Sheffield ballroom, then Simone Dinnerstein plays her Goldberg Variations on a 1903 Steinway that was once in the Hull Town Hall.
The piano survived wartime bombs, crossed the Atlantic and was used in 2002 at the opening of the World Trade Center's Winter Garden.
While some might take exception to her lingering wash of sound, especially in the slower variations, the American pianist's expert articulation never obscures the Bachian latticework underneath.
Complex canons show beauty can come from contrapuntal logic without any Glenn Gould brutality. Fiery toccatas take on the territory of Scarlatti and towards the end, in the gossamer-like 28th Variation, one almost senses Chopin waiting in the wings.
* Bach: Six Concertos for the Margrave of Brandenburg (Avie AV 2119, through Ode Records)
* Simone Dinnerstein: Bach's Goldberg Variations (Telarc CD 80692, through Elite Imports)
