Johann Sebastian Bach’s three great cycles of suites belong to the fundamental canon of piano literature: the Partitas and the so-called English and French Suites. It is the French Suites that have long been by far the most popular – and this was also the case at the time that they were written.

However, this also creates problems for an editor preparing an Urtext edition, because a vast number of copies of them were made by Bach’s circle of pupils, and these contain many presumably authentic...