Reviews of Bach solo Cello Suites BWV 1007-12 CCS12298

Gramophone September 1998 by Nicholas Anderson

Netherlands-born cellist, Pieter Wispelwey, is equally at home on baroque and modern instruments. His recent disc of Vivaldi cello concertos (Channel Classics 8/97), through brilliantly played, I found only intermittently satisfying. His Bach suites, on the other hand, are a quite different matter - not surprisingly since these are his second thoughts on the set; his first versions date back to 1989. These new performances are carefully prepared, beautifully executed and most eloquently expressed. The instruments too, sound well. Wispelwey having chosen an early eighteenth-century cello by Barak Norman for the first five Suites and a violoncello piccolo by an unidentified craftsman for the special requirements of the Sixth Suite. We are not absolutely sure about what instrument Bach had in mind for this piece but, though it can be performed on a standard cello, a five-stringed violoncello piccolo seems a likely candidate.

Wispelwey is an imaginative player witha highly developed sense of fantasy. These qualities are as welcome in his performances of Bach as they are to be treated with circumspection in his almost entirely fanciful written introduction to the music. Preludes come across especially well since it is in these wonderfully varied opening movements, with their rhetorical diversity, that the performer can give rein most freely to his or her most natural conversational inflexions. Where Jaap ter Linden, in his recent accomplished recording makes, what seems to me, heavy weather of the Prelude of the G major Suite, Wispelwey articulates the phrases more briskly and with lighter, more subtle inflexions. And he makes the most of that thrilling climax at the peak of a chromatic accent through a full scale and a half. More of it, indeed, than any recorded performance, other than that of Pierre Fournier, that I have heard. Sarabandes are profound and reflective without being weighty, and allemandes graceful and substantial. The galanteries, by contrast, are lightly bowed and redolent of playful and demonstrative gestures. That, to an extent, is true also of the courantes, while the gigues are firmly projected, full-toned and splendidly robust.

Wispelwey's se of Bach's Cello Suites, then, is deserving of praise. If you are familiar with the gruff grandeur of Pablo Casals, or the aristocratic nobility of Fournier, then these performances will throw an entirely different light on the music, more conversational and with airier discourse. I shal never want to be without the two earlier sets, but Wispelwey's version sits comfortably on the upper-most range ot the period-instrument performance ladder. Strongly recommended.


Report from French magazine Diapason Autumn 1998 (Diapason D'Or)

Pieter Wispelwey's accompanying article deserves to be read - a fascinating text which begins: "One really has to imagine hearing [these suites] as though they had just been composed, as if they were young music which has not been subjected to the weight of successive interpretations [...] In short, as though it were new music, modern, intriguing". Here he has provided us with the essential spirit of his recording: "forget and play"; the most authentic version is the one which one improvises after having forgotten all the others, including one's own. And this recording, in fact, bears hardly any ressemblance to the one made for the same label by the same (or another?) Wispelwey eight years ago. The tempi have changed, above all in the Preludes (faster), the tone is much freer and more original, the musical thought is at the same time more liberated, more concentrated, and more direct. One hears fewer notes and more music. The barlines are less obviously present, and the rhythm is more prominent. The gestural character of the dances is better allied to their weight. And most of all, each suite has been given a sharper innocent soul, someone who has been injured, another who is self-assured; in the second half they become a philosopher (no 4), a melancholic (no 5) and an enlightened monarch (no 6). From one suite to the next, Wispelwey invites us into widely differing worlds, even thought his tone and articulation remain consistently at the highest level of nobility. There is never a trace of rhetoric or over-emphasis to compel our attention. Everything is said in mezza voce, with tact, just at the edge of perceptibility. No other version attains quite this degree of extremely elegant diction, based on a sonority composed entirely of simplicity and refinement - a sonority, moreover, which is difficult to reproduce, because of its great subtlety of attack and nuance, and one which can rapidly degenerate into caricature if the sounds are too rapidly muted. In addition to a degree of technical perfection which emphasizes the occasional weaknesses of Anner Bylsma's most recent recording (Sony-Vivarte), this reserved reading is of the highest musical interest. It renews our approach to the Suites, combining mastery and imagination, strictness and freedom, sobriety and daring.