András Schiff, Wigmore Hall, review Six Bach recitals for a sixtieth birthday: András Schiff's series at the Wigmore Hall, which culminates just before Christmas, is shaping up as one of the musical highlights of the season. Coming so close together, the concerts also represent remarkable feats of concentration and memory on the part of the pianist, not least in this marathon of the six - that number again - Partitas, the most ambitious of all Bach's keyboard suites. For just a few minutes at the start, this performance felt as if it might prove less of a feat of the imagination. The modern trend for completist, wall-to-wall programming would have puzzled Bach and probably even horrified him, since his music was never designed to be heard like this. Yet after a couple of slightly under-characterised movements, Schiff's playing took poetic flight and never looked back. Performing the Partitas in his usual, idiosyncratic sequence and thus opening with No. 5 in G, when he got to its Tempo di minuetta and began playfully picking out staccato notes from the flowing textures, Schiff proved himself again to be a towering Bachian. Schiff also showed just how individual these works are, with unexpected movements cropping up in between the usual cornerstones of Baroque musical architecture - for example, No. 3"s Burlesca and Scherzo, the latter with its wittily escaping bass lines. All end with fugal gigues, or gigue-substitutes, and Schiff's playing of the finale to No. 1 was especially playful while never detracting from the overall intellectual rigour of his performances. Long on the vanguard of reclaiming Bach for the piano, Schiff delivers period-informed performances with a slightly narrower range of dynamics and colour than some modern interpreters conjure up, yet the results are more concentrated and ravishing. The serenity he brought to No. 4"s long, sustained Allemande was extraordinary, and while there could be quibbles over whether this or that Sarabande was meditative enough, the cumulative effect was spellbinding. Schiff's odyssey ended, appropriately, with the especially challenging Partita No. 6 in E minor. Unlike its predecessors in the set, there is no jollity in its final, monster gigue, an angular and anguished piece that almost takes us into late Beethoven territory and is every bit as radical for its time (c. 1725) as the Grosse Fuge was in 1825. Yet after three hours, Schiff still had a smile on his face. So did we.