Catalogue

Summary:

Bach’s cello suites are shrouded in mystery. We don’t know when they were written. We don’t know for whom they were written. We don’t know which instrument they were written for. We don’t have Bach’s own manuscript. And we thought we knew how they should be played, but we don’t. We take Pau Casals’ superb recordings as authoritative, but he knew little to nothing about how they were intended to be played: that knowledge had not yet arrived in our culture. That in itself is amazing: how it took the music world two centuries to understand that music of the past was not at all played in the style of the present. From the moment Mendelssohn revised Bach’s St. Matthew in 1839, we have been consistently playing music from bygone eras; yet, only after WW2, more than a few musical geeks became aware that our performance practice was not the way Bach or even Mozart and Beethoven intended their music to be played; and only in this century has that awareness (somewhat) spread to the general public. Linda Ronstadt would not have been caught dead singing an American standard the way she learned from Maria Callas to sing Puccini – but that’s exactly what we have been doing to Bach. Classical music is played in a style based on what I call the Puccini Singing Style of the 1930s, a style that has nothing whatsoever to do and quite little in common with Bach’s musical idiom. Our quest is not history, it is authenticity in Linda’s meaning of the word: perform each style in the way it deserves to be performed. To accomplish that, Ms. Ronstadt visited musicians prominent in their field. We don’t even have recordings. We have to be historians in order to revive a lost musical idiom.

Tracklist:

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750)

Cello Suites Nos. 1-6