“This is, in short, every bit as wonderful as Schepkin's previous releases of the Goldberg Variations and the Partitas had led me to expect. Finely captured by Ongaku's recording engineer Brad Michel, under the supervision of Andrew Infanti and the pianist himself, the playing is at once crisp and mellow, lucid and warm, tonally luxuriant and refined. The counterpoint is as clear and logical as I have ever heard it, yet individual fugal entries are never obtrusively underlined. Several years of concentration on playing Bach have made Schepkin a stylist at once authoritative and supremely natural... Altogether this is a performance that combines the thrilling inventiveness already evident in Schepkin's first recordings with a mature wisdom beyond his still young years. It takes its place beside Masaaki Suzuki's harpsichord performance on BIS as my Book 1 of choice, and outclasses every commercially released piano version of the music I have heard...”
—Bernard Jacobson, Fanfare
“Music that transcends time and place deserves to be reinterpreted often by musicians with a well-defined point of view and the conviction to dare to be themselves. Schepkin is such an artist. Clarity, resonance, punctuation, lyricism, sonority, and an electric sense of rhythm that cannot help but set the listener's feet dancing combine to produce the magic that Bach, so supremely versatile, must have intended. This greatest of composers offers an enormous range of possibilities to musicians of integrity who are willing to cast off the restrictions and rules developed through the centuries and followed dogmatically by lesser artists. Among many fine Bach players, Schepkin is a worthy, most welcome addition to the top of the ‘A’ list.”
Five Stars (top rating)
—Amazon.com
“An extraordinary young pianist...with striking purity of tone, complete
technical control and restless intelligence…Mr. Schepkin’s lofty perspective
held one mesmerized…Clear, penetrating and bristling with life…a major
technique…a major Bach pianist.”
—The New York Times
CD PICK OF THE WEEK
—Ira Rosenblum, New York Today