Bach: Cello Suite

Baroque cellist Tanya Tomkins makes an indelible impression with her virtuosic recording of J S Bach’s Cello Suites. Tanya Tomkins, one of the foremost cellists of her generation, makes an indelible impression scaling the pinnacle of the cello repertoire, J S Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. Familiar to record collectors through her appearance on Avie’s release of Kummer’s Cello Duets, and as a member of the Benvenue Fortepiano Trio’s Mendelssohn and Schumann recordings, Tanya is equally at home in an intimate house concert setting or anchoring the cello section of the San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.

In the '80s there were those listeners who thought that Heinrich Schiff might redeem cello performance practice from fatal beauty and lethal elegance. Aside from the burly and brawny Rostropovich, more and more cellists were advocating a performance style whose ideals were perfect intonation and graceful phrasing. In some repertoire, say, Fauré, these are perfectly legitimate goals. In other repertoire, Beethoven and Brahms, say, it is a terrible mistake. In Bach's Cello Suites, as the fay and fragile Yo-Yo Ma recordings make clear, it was a terminal mistake. Not so in Schiff's magnificently muscular 1984 recordings of the suites: Schiff's rhythms, his tempos, his tone, his intonation, and especially his interpretations were anything but fay or fragile. In Schiff's performance, Bach's Cello Suites are not the neurasthenic music of a composer supine with dread and despair in the dark midnight of the soul, but the forceful music of a mature composer in full control of himself and his music.

The very short list of credits on this Warner Classics release includes Russian American cellist Nina Kotova and producer Adam Abeshouse, who delivers a very closely miked sound in the frequently used Performing Arts Recital Hall of Purchase College on Long Island, New York. But perhaps the uncredited star on this set of Bach's Six Suites for solo cello is Kotova's 1679 Stradivarius instrument, which Kotova exploits to the maximum.

Cellist Sara Sant'Ambrogio says ''Before I knew language, I knew Bach'' referring to her earliest memories of growing up in a house full of classical music. A founding member of the Eroica Trio, with recordings on Angel/EMI Classics, Sant'Ambrogio has been profiled in Strings, Strad, Gramophone, and more. She performs on a Matteo Goffriller cello, Venice, ca. 1715. Sara earned rave reviews for her earlier Bach CD (Cello Suites, 1, 3, & 5), and these recordings are even better.

Most of Sara Sant'Ambrogio's recordings have been as cellist with the Eroica Trio, but she takes on the odd numbers of J.S. Bach's Six Suites for unaccompanied cello in this 2009 solo outing, and it's an ambitious undertaking. This album faces comparisons with several great recordings of the suites, and this young cellist likewise faces scrutiny for playing works associated with such names as Casals, Fournier, and Rostropovich, past masters of the instrument.

Truls Mørk, you have to admit, is a very cool name for a cellist. A native of Norway, Mørk is a cellist whose tone ranges from intimate pianissimos to immense fortissimos without ever losing its essential combination of passionate lyricism and cool lucidity, a cellist whose interpretations range from blissful joy to endless despair without every losing its fundamental balance of total dedication and cool objectivity, a cellist, in short, who lives up to his name.