For the last few days, barely five minutes pass where I do not hear Bach's Suite No. 1 in G major, Prelude, in my head. The melody has been sitting there, haunting me. I can't explain why. Before Bach, Erik Satie's Six Gnossiennes: No.1: Lent was on a constant loop (the Aldo Ciccolini version I should add). Keep in mind, the music is in my mind - not my iPod, although in order to bring the music to reality, I have been turning on the iPod. I do find it odd that such contrasting compositions are occupying my head space, admittedly I am happy to have moved on to Bach, but only slightly. Satie's music is very sophisticated and can throw one into a very pensive mood (as the piano often does - I call it the "brain" of the orchestra). But the cello is the heart of any composition and Bach's cello suites can easily move someone to tears if one is really, really listening. The best renderings on the planet are by Yo Yo Ma and Pablo Casals.
When I was a little kid I wanted to play the cello, my brother wanted to play the violin. My parents decided they weren't purchasing two instruments - so I was forced to play violin (or no instrument at all). I played violin for all of five years in my youth and even played in the school orchestra as well as the county youth orchestra (whereas my brother dropped the instrument after a year, go figure). Today, I can only remember how to hold the instrument (how sad). In my mind, I am convinced that if it were a cello, I would still be playing. The sound is magnificent, the instrument is held so that it is almost one with the player. The sound must be coaxed from the wood and bow, you have to ask for it, not demand of it. In my mind, while I write this, I am thinking of some of the great cello masters - Rostropovich, Emanuel Fuermann, Pablo Casals, Mischa Maisky, Yo yo Ma, Natalia Gutman, Jacqueline du Pre, Daniil Shafran, and the rising Alban Gerhardt. I also think of some of the pieces I adore like Fire Dance, Bach's Cello Suites, The Swan from "The Carnival of the animals", Elgar Cello Concerto, Prokofiev Cello Concerto... there are also works that I don't like so much (Claude Debussy comes to mind, despite it's mad brilliance).
However, to fully embrace these compositions and the talent of the musicians, one ought to watch a cellist play. The fingering technique of Alban Gerhardt is oddly similar to Mischa Maisky - although the two men "hold" the cello completely differently. Yo Yo Ma is as graceful as Rostropovich as his fingers slides down through the chords. And although Pablo Casals has the most notable recording of Bach's Cello Suites, it is Yo yo Ma's rendering that moves me to tears... every single time. Coincidentally, the two worked together before Yo yo Ma entered Harvard.
Without Casals, people everywhere would have had substantially less music to explore. Also, both he and Mr. Ma are necessary to make a point about the very transience of tastes in music.
Much debate exists as to why Bach composed these works or even when (the best scholars agree sometime between 1717-1723). I find it fascinating that the suites were so obscure as to be almost completely unknown until the turn of the century. They had not just fallen into dusty oblivion; they rested at the absolute bottom of the classical hierarchy. Back during a time when so much as installing an end piece on a cello was apostasy, Bach was falling out of current favor with performing musicians. The handful of people who even knew the suites existed viewed them as brittle exercises, deemed of slight acquisition value only because of the composer's name. The suites may likely have continued to be ignored by all, until the paper they were written on rotted into a condition not even suitable for fish-wrap and the music could have been lost forever, but for a 13-year-old young man named Pablo Casals.
Casals at the time was playing in a café in Barcelona four hours a day, for four pesetas a day, to finance his music lessons. New to the cello, he was always looking for new music. He happened upon a rare copy of the suites in a second-hand shop in 1889, was intrigued because he didn't know these even existed any where in the world, and then became ecstatic when he recognized what he had found and their worth. He then devoted a dozen years of study and practice before performing the suites in public. Casals became the first person in the world to record them (1915) and more than 20 years later (after much persuading) he recorded them in their entirety, which he did only once. Yet his ongoing passion for the works brought the music back to life. From something regarded as museum shelf paper to being revered now as a masterpiece for cello the equivalent of the Goldberg Variations, these six suites are now studied and played by nearly every master and student of the cello.
For his own pupils, Casals characterized the works by giving each piece a distinct mood. He told the young players that each suite takes its character from the prelude. According to Casals, No. 1. is "optimistic", No. 5. "tempestuous", and No. 6. "bucolic".
Yo yo Ma's execution is sometimes more like a dance out of the shadows into the filtered sunlight of a deep forest. Ma's playing is refined and elegant. His very fluidity in most passages can make his approach seem strangely stiff in others. Also, this fluency is a most individual interpretation, not as stopped or abrupt as more "authentic" players tend to read the music. You can hear his breathing, which only reminds me of how he seldom wavers from the natural breath of the music and understands the pulse. While Casals (for reasons unknown to me) preferred to play the Allemande in No. 5 straight through, Ma follows the notation for two repeated passages, prolonging the piece for several minutes longer and re-emphasizing the mood by his restatement. Though the suites may take their character from the prelude, here it seems from the prelude's very first note, which might be the single most important note when playing unaccompanied.
Though just hearing the Bach cello suites is always somehow reassuring, at this stage of the game for me, they are like old friends, although perhaps a bit more reliable. I'd encourage you to get both Casals and Yo yo Ma and start making up your own mind.
