Suspended Animation
...There is no evidence that Bach ever intended his six suites for solo cello to be played all at once, and he probably would have found the idea ridiculous. In fact, the sixth suite was written for a different instrument, a five-string cello. Nonetheless, the works fit together as a thematic cycle. Each has its own profile, and the sequence adds up to a tour of the psychological horizon. Pablo Casals called the suites "optimistic", "tragic", "heroic", "grandiose", "tempestuous", and "bucolic". Wispelwey, in a delightful essay on them, adds more biographical detail. The G-major suite, he says, is innocent, childlike; the D-minor suite hurt and sorrowful, like a teenage poet. The C-major suite he imagines as a swaggering crown prince, the E-flat-major as a philosopher peering into the depths. The C-minor suite is melancholy, "aloof and threatening". The D-major suite, he says, is innocence regained; the music should defy gravity and dance in mid air.
Wispelwey is a forty year old Dutch cellist who is somehow having a major international career despite the fact that he is not named Yo-Yo. He is a free-spirited, keenly intelligent musician who employs both a baroque and a modern cello. He played the first five Bach suites on a modern instrument - for the sixth he used an authentic five-string cello - but his intimate, conversational phrasing echoed what we vaguely know of baroque practice. When virtuoso cellists play Bach, they sometimes come across as movie stars who are trying their hand at costume drama; the gestures are too big, the emotions too effusive. Wispelwey, who can belt out low C's with the best of them, never seems to impose his personality on the music.
His playing is physical first and intellectual second, which is ultimately the way to go. Whether singing, dancing, raging, or ruminating, it mimics the contours of human gesture and speech. It seldom sticks to a steady beat. Wispelwey often lingers dangerously long on the first note of a measure, then sweeps impetuously through an ornament or a run. In the G-major suite, he played the second half of the Prelude much faster than the first, as if he'd just had a brainstorm. His concentration seemed to fade a bit toward the end of the evening, and something about the climate of the room kept sending the piccolo cello out of tune. Still, he produced the promised dancing-on-air effect in the last suite, playing buoyantly high into the treble.
The concert took place at Alice Tully Hall, as part of Lincoln Center's Bach Variations series. The following morning, after a presumably deep sleep, Wispelwey showed up at the adjacent Walter Reade Theater to play the three cello suites of Benjamin Britten. These works, written in the sixties and early seventies for Mstislav Rostropovich, lose amazingly little in comparison with Bach's, and the Third Suite, which Britten wrote in 1971, as his heart began to give out, loses nothing. It is a set of inwardly agonized variations on four Russian themes, including the Kontakion funeral hymn. In its iteration of solitary notes amid encroaching silence, it breathes the same thin air as Shostokovich's late quartets. Britten wrote it in nine days, which is how long it took me to create my latest masterwork, a cheque to Con Ed.
Wispelwey brought out in Britten the same intimate power that he found in Bach. His recording of the Britten suites, on the Channel Classics label, edges out all rivals. I'd also recommend his recording of the Bach suites over most available alternatives. Casals and Pierre Fournier may reach more rarified heights; Wispelwey catches Bach at his most vital and human.