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Johann Sebastian BACH(1685-1750) Suites for unaccompanied cello (c.1721)
CD 1
Suite no. 1 in G major (BWV 1007) [19:47]
Suite no. 2 in D minor (BWV 1008) [21:29]
Suite no. 6 in D major (BWV 1012) [29:27]
CD 2
Suite no. 3 in C major BWV 1009 [24:48]
Suite no. 4 in E flat major BWV 1010 [25:04]
Suite no. 5 in C minor BWV 1011 [28:05]
Angela East (baroque cello, England, 1725; 5-stringed cello after
Amati, 2000)
rec. François-Bernier Concert Hall, Le Domaine Forget, Saint-Irénée,
Canada, May, 2001 (nos.1, 3, 5 and 6) and Troy Savings Bank Concert
Hall, New York, February 2004 (nos. 2 and 4). DDD.
RED PRIEST RECORDINGS RP006 [70:35 + 78:07]
Angela East’s recording of the first Cello Suite has already
appeared on an earlier issue from Red Priest Recordings: Baroque
Cello Illuminations (RP005). I felt that the earlier CD
would be of interest mainly to teachers and students of the
cello – see review
– but I singled out the recording of Bach first Cello Suite
at the end of the recital (trs.22-27) as being of general interest.
I wrote that it augured so well for her complete recording that
readers might prefer to wait for that to appear separately.
The illuminations of the title are certainly present here, in
that she makes music which can sometimes sound merely intellectual
and academic genuinely affective. She isn’t the only performer
to do so, but her performance deserves to be ranked with the
best which, for my money, include Pierre Fournier (DG Archiv
449 7112 or 477 6724, both at lower mid-price) and Paul Tortelier
(EMI GROC 5628782, mid-price, or Classics for Pleasure 2283582,
budget price).
My colleague Jonathan Woolf was less impressed with the performance
of that Suite than with the rest of the programme:
This performance is certainly individualistic. She takes the
opening very slowly and I find her phrasing in the Courante
unusual – the articulation sounds forced and somewhat unnatural.
There’s considerable power in the Gigue finale, but overall
idiosyncrasy seeps into this performance. (See review).
Since Baroque Cello Illuminations came my way, I have
heard the Steven Isserlis performances on Hyperion (CDA67541/2,
full price), which Dominy Clements made Recording of the Month
in May 2007 – see review
– and listened again to Tortelier’s two recordings, and I have
to admit that I do now prefer the Isserlis account of Suite
No.1. He offers not just the normal version of the Prelude but
also, as an appendix, three alternatives, from the Anna Magdalena
MS, the Johann Peter Kellner MS and from the collection of Johann
Christoph Westphal. His timings for these versions range from
2:21 to 2:29; Fournier on his classic DGG Archiv recording takes
2:50 and Tortelier 2:31 (1961) or 2:25 (1983). Against that
consensus East’s 3:59 does seem extremely slow, yet somehow
I still think that the tempo just about works – deliberate,
without seeming laboured.
In the booklet Ms. East notes that the preludes of all but no.5
meander in a style similar to the earlier ricercar. This
may sound like scholarship shaping performance, but I have no
objection to that happening if the result is musical and not
merely pedantic. In fact, the ricercar, though an old-fashioned
form in Bach’s day, was employed in the Musical Offering
which he presented to King Friedrich of Prussia as late as 1747.
The ricercars in the Offering differ from the
earlier form for solo instrument which East has in mind, in
that they are in three- and six-parts and analogous to the fugue,
but the fact that Bach chose to include them and to give them
that name shows that he was at least interested in this archaic
form.
Jonathan Woolf’s other reservation concerns the phrasing in
the third movement courante. Here East’s tempo is almost
identical to those of Isserlis and both Tortelier versions,
with Fournier a fraction slower, but it is true that Isserlis
maintains a steadier tempo and more even legato phrasing
throughout. Comparing the two, I have to admit that I prefer
his steadier playing, but I didn’t find East idiosyncratic to
the point of inadmissibility and, once again, she offers a reason
for her practice in the notes in her desire to distinguish between
the various dance movements such as the courante and
the sarabande.
Let me take an analogy from acting. When Macbeth imagines that
he cannot wash off the blood of the murdered Duncan, the First
Folio text inserts a comma between ‘one’ and ‘Red’: “this my
Hand will rather / The multitudinous Seas incarnadine, / Making
the Greene one, Red.” [II.ii.18-20] This punctuation makes perfect
sense: ‘turning the green [sea] red.’ There is, however, another
possibility, which involves placing a dramatic pause between
‘Greene’ and ‘one’ and stressing the word ‘Greene’, which makes
the meaning ‘turning [the sea] from green to completely red.’
(‘One’ in the sense of ‘overall’.) It is possible to be dogmatic
in favouring either of these, vehemently rejecting the alternative
as wrong, but, since we don’t have a direct line to Shakespeare,
we can’t ask him which is correct. If we could, he might even
say that either is possible in the mouth of the right actor.
The modern standard Oxford text omits the comma, thereby leaving
the meaning open.
On the other hand, television newsreaders and weather forecasters,
especially the latter, seem addicted to a spurious version of
this kind of dramatic pause and stress, using it to emphasise
all the wrong words in a sentence – prepositions and conjunctions
in particular. The BBC News channel seems particularly proud
of a clip in which the newsreader says “Now here’s some news
which has been breaking [short pause] IN [heavy stress] the
last half hour”; they play it all the time, blissfully unaware,
it seems, that it’s a prime example of where not to place the
stress.
Overall, whilst admitting the truth of JW’s reservations, I
still find Ms. East’s account of the first Suite illuminating
and enjoyable. Her slow tempo for the opening and her phrasing
in the courante seem to me more akin to the actor finding
alternative meaning in Shakespeare than the sheer bad practice
of TV weather forecasters. I admit that the reasons for those
variations from the normal practice may be academic, even cerebral.
I don’t normally subscribe to the view that Bach is a cerebral
composer – it’s no accident that many jazz musicians love his
music – but this is, for me, some of Bach’s most cerebral music.
There are some literary texts which need editorial and expository
intervention if we are to understand them. Such a work is Langland’s
Piers Plowman, a medieval text of considerably greater
complexity than his near-contemporary Chaucer and with a very
complicated manuscript history which makes it difficult to establish
the original text. The standard modern edition, edited by Kane
and Donaldson for the Athlone Press (1975) is not a work of
great beauty, with individual words and letters encased in various
kinds of square brackets or italicised, but these typographical
inconveniences demonstrate the way in which the editors determined
the nearest approach to the author’s text. Schmidt’s standard
undergraduate edition of the same text for Everyman (1975, 1991)
also disfigures the text; though he employs fewer brackets,
he glosses difficult words at the end of each line or at the
foot of the page. Both editions include information about variant
manuscript readings at the foot of the page. I accept Angela
East’s performance of the courante as the equivalent
of these modern texts of Piers Plowman. Neither is as
neat or uncluttered as we might wish, but the result is informative.
Bear in mind that Alfred Brendel’s performances of Schubert’s
last three piano sonatas, both the original ADD and the DDD
remakes, have been criticised for agogic distortion. I’m not,
of course, claiming that Angela East’s Bach is of comparable
quality to Brendel’s Schubert, which I rate with the greatest
interpretations of this great music.
Now comes the real challenge. I normally try to ignore what
other reviewers have written until I have fully made up my mind
about a recording, but I can’t ignore the fact that two other
reviewers, one writing in French, his colleague in English,
have castigated the complete set as the worst-ever recording
of these works. Helpfully, one of them specifies what he believes
to be the source of the problem – academic study resulting in
musically senseless playing – and the movements which are the
chief object of his criticism: the final gigue of No.3
and the sarabande of No.2.
That sarabande is the prime bête noire for both
of them, so I’d better deal with it first. It is slow by comparison
with other performers: East takes 5:20 as against Tortelier’s
4:09 (1961) and 4:50 (1983), Fournier’s 4:18 and Isserlis’s
3:55. A sarabande is, of course, by definition, a stately
dance; Oscar Wilde even gives it the mournful aspect of nightmarish
ghosts in his Ballad of Reading Gaol: “About, about,
in ghostly rout / They trod a saraband: / And the damned grotesques
made arabesques, / Like the wind upon the sand!” As performed
by Steven Isserlis, the movement might well be taken as an illustration
of Wilde’s vision. There may be fewer arabesques in East’s performance
but her less even phrasing even more effectively conjures the
damned grotesques.
It may not be your view of the movement and I’m not entirely
convinced by it, but it does seem to me to be a legitimate way
of seeing the music. It certainly serves to illustrate the point
which she makes in the notes that there should be a contrast
‘between the courantes and the sarabandes in the D minor and
C minor suites’: her courante is very little slower than
Isserlis’ and Tortelier’s, but her much slower tempo for the
sarabande certainly makes for a stark contrast between
the two movements. Where her rivals take about twice as long
for the sarabande as for the courante, East’s
little extra makes a bigger contrast. As Steven Isserlis notes
in his commentary on the dances in the Hyperion booklet, Bach
expends a great deal of emotional power in the sarabandes and
they lie ‘emotionally as well as physically at the very heart
of each suite.’ As a matter of interest, I note that Rostropovich
is much slower even than East in this sarabande; both
clearly take that point about the centrality of this movement
seriously.
The other contentious movement is the gigue which concludes
the third suite. At 3:47 Angela East is a fraction slower than
Paul Tortelier (1961, 3:20 or 1983, 3:21) and noticeably slower
than Steven Isserlis (3:06) and Rostropovich (2:51). Isserlis
notes in the Hyperion booklet that the gigue is associated
with rolling drunkenness; there’s a particularly colourful one
in Telemann’s so-called Water Music, leading into an even more
rollicking final canarie, in which the drunken boatmen
are depicted.
East’s account of the preceding bourrées combines liveliness
and reflection in about equal measure. There’s a good deal of
accelerando and ritardando, crescendo and
diminuendo about her performance of the gigue;
even heard in its own context before detailed comparison, the
effect does seem a little too pointed, almost manic in places.
Isserlis is lighter in the bourrées – more liveliness
than reflection here, though the latter aspect of the music
is certainly not overlooked. Without a pause he sails into the
gigue and here again the dominant tone is sweetness and
light, with none of those dramatic gestures which Angela East
makes. This time I do have a very clear preference for Isserlis
in this movement.
Perhaps Ms East’s dramatic gestures signify an interpretation
too subtle for most of us to grasp. The only hint that she gives
us in her notes is to refer to the markings which she has consulted
in the various manuscript sources, principally in Anna Magdalena’s
copy, but I don’t hear the same kind of major deviations from
the norm in the appended performances of the variant MS versions
of the opening movement of the first suite which conclude the
Isserlis recording. As it is, I can only liken her performance
here to the photograph in the centre of the booklet in which
she is seen carrying her cello down a baroque staircase, apparently
not looking where she is going and, thus, in danger of tripping
over her long dress.
The Red Priest recording is close but acceptable. There’s some
rather pretentious stuff about the imagery of these suites in
the booklet; I didn’t find this or the accompanying illustrations
very helpful – Angela East sitting on a sea-girt rock on the
cover and again, wearing a different dress, inside; sitting
in a giant cobweb, etc. I would have greatly preferred some
of her more scholarly insights instead. The information about
how the recordings took almost nine years to come before the
public was interesting but, again, I’d have preferred something
more like the kind of exemplary notes which grace the Hyperion
set. Isserlis, too, has some personal theories about the moods
of the various suites, but he relegates them to an interesting
afterthought and heads them ‘definitely not a theory!’
I can’t imagine this new release being as popular as the earlier
Red Priest recordings, especially Nightmare in Venice
(RRP002) and Pirates of the Baroque (RRP004). It may
not be your personal view of the Bach Cello Suites; it isn’t
always mine, but I respect what it has to offer and I certainly
wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand, apart, perhaps, from that gigue
at the end of Suite No.3. Nevertheless, Steven Isserlis on Hyperion
(CDA67541/2) makes a much safer recommendation at full price,
with Paul Tortelier 1961 (EMI GROC 5628782), Pierre Fournier
(DG Archiv 449 7112 or 477 6724) and Mstislav Rostropovich (EMI
Recommends 5181582) vying for the mid-price honours or Tortelier
1983 on budget-price CFP (2283582). The Isserlis is also available
for download in mp3 or lossless flac for £15.49 from Hyperion.
Brian Wilson
Angela East has contacted me with detailed reasons for those
aspects of her performance on which I and others have commented.
She has also kindly offered to meet me to point out and illustrate
on the cello the markings in the oldest of our sources, the
Anna Magdalena manuscript, which she chose to adhere to. I hope
at some future date to contribute a longer article on the outcome
of that meeting.
BW
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