The English Suites - Carole Cerasi

NEW RECORDING OF BACH'S ENGLISH SUITES FROM VIRTUOSO LONDON BASED HARPSICHORDIST CAROLE CERASI

The English Suites are the earliest of Bach’s three major collections of keyboard Suites. They were written in Weimar between 1708 and 1717 and are considerably more technically demanding than anything that had been written for harpsichord before in Germany. It is not known exactly why they are called “English”: a copy once in the possession of his son J.C.Bach – the London Bach is headed “pour les Anglois”, but a more likely explanation is that they follow a suite form established by the composer Dieupart, who settled in London in 1700, and thus known to Bach as English.