Pablo Casals Cello Bach

Nobody knows why Johann Sebastian Bach composed his six suites for solo cello. Nor does anybody know how it came about that the suites were soon afterwards consigned to oblivion and more than a century before a 13-year-old Spanish musical prodigy discovered a worn copy of the score in a second-hand bookstore store in Bar- celona. For the next 11 years Pablo Casals practiced them every day. Finally, in 1936, he entered London’s Abbey Road studios to record the second and third suites for the first time. The rest, as they say, is history. Today, Bach’s cello suites have become a rite of passage for all aspiring cellists.

After her acclaimed PENTATONE debut with Transfigured Night, Alisa Weilerstein returns with a complete recording of Bach’s Cello Suites. These pieces present the highest mountain to climb for any cellist, and one of the most transcendent and rewarding experiences for listeners alike. With his suites, Bach crafted — essentially without direct precedent — a body of solo cello music that forever defined the genre and brought the Baroque cello on par with its more popular cousin, the viola da gamba. Since Pablo Casals put them in the limelight again after 150 years of relative oblivion, Bach’s suites have become the alpha and omega for generations of cellists. To Weilerstein, the joy of this music — vibrant, contemporary, unquestionably alive — is the joy of discovery. Having heard and studied these pieces for years, she now entrusts her interpretation to the listener.

The six Cello Suites, BWV 1007–1012, are suites for unaccompanied cello by Johann Sebastian Bach. They are some of the most frequently performed solo compositions ever written for cello. Bach most likely composed them during the period 1717–1723, when he served as Kapellmeister in Köthen. The title given on the cover of the Anna Magdalena Bach manuscript was Suites à Violoncello Solo senza Basso (Suites for cello solo without bass).

There has not been a more important or influential body of cello music written before or since the 6 Bach Cello Suites. Now treated almost reverentially by cellists, for two hundred years they were virtually unknown until a young Catalan cellist, Pablo Casals, discovered them in a little shop and breathed life back into these masterpieces. For some the music is deeply spiritual, for others the pieces are closely connected with nature… or perhaps it is the ingenuity of their structure and symmetry that inspires people to be moved by the Cello Suites. Whatever the reasons, people always come back to Bach.