I was chatting with a friend — a former pianist who has gone back to school to get his PhD in musicology — who asked me why I love Baroque music so much.

I told him that it represented order in my personal world, which has seemed particularly full of chaos lately.

He looked perplexed, and responded that there’s quite a bit of chaos and experimentation in Baroque music.

I said that it was the sturdiness and reliability of the underlying plan that pleased me so: order overlaid with creativity in mood, colour, counterpoint, texture and modulation.

Finest of all is the symmetry — something that’s better suited to fiction than reality.

Feeling like spending the day indoors, I set the two books of George Frideric Handel’s Keyboard Suites on the music stand, and went at them, getting completely lost in music that, when one unlocks the key to its shapes and patterns, is as winsome as anything from Handel’s operas or oratorios. It all comes from the same place, of course.

There aren’t a lot of recordings out there of Handel’s Keyboard Suites. They are split between the purists, who perform them on harpsichord, and the modernists, who render them on the piano.

As much as I love period performance, the modern piano has so much to offer in the way of sound and control.

One nice compromise interpretation belongs to Toronto pianist Ben Smith, who plays the Suite No. 3 in D minor, HWV 428.

I’ve followed it with a snippet of French pianist Racha Arodaky (playing a Minuet in G minor from Suite No. 1 in the second book), whose approach to the music is very similar to my own (and purists are allowed to cringe).

If you speak French, you might enjoy Arodaky’s explanation, where she speaks of the music’s innate sensuality, and of the wonders of being able to play it on a modern piano (she released an album of Partitas by J.S. Bach this month):

John Terauds

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John Terauds

John Terauds, Editor-Emeritus of Ludwig van Toronto, is currently a Divinity student at the University of Toronto and a church music director. He joined the Toronto Star in 1988, was the classical music critic from 2005 to 2012, and continues as a freelance critic for the paper. He is the co-author of Roy Thomson Hall: A Portrait, a book written with Toronto Star Colleague, William Littler.

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