J.S. Bach: Cello Suites
Every cellist of renown eventually faces up to the Everest of their repertoire, the solo Cello Suites of J.S. Bach. For Giovanni Sollima, this has been a work of many years in the making, as he explains in a booklet introduction.
As with so many musicians, he suddenly found empty time stretching before him during the pandemic, and this space for reflection and study enabled him to deepen his relationship with music which he has known for decades. In doing so, he discovered a new perspective on it by playing all six of the suites on the violoncello piccolo for which Bach probably wrote the Sixth. This is an obsolete, five-stringed instrument, of a size between viola and standard cello. With his background in historically informed performance, he settled on gut strings and a pitch of A = 415hz: a semitone lower than the standard modern tuning of A = 440hz.
‘I am looking for a sound not adjusted to today’s parameters, and an answer to the question of expression which is distant from the vision of the 19th and early 20th centuries.’
Even more than the choice of instrument, his couplings shed a uniquely illuminating light on these familiar pieces. Giovanni Sollima has assembled a kind of reception history in sound of the Cello Suites. It takes in Alfredo Piatti’s late-Romantic arrangement of the Gigue from the First Suite for cello and piano; likewise Robert Schumann’s earlier transcription of the Gigue from the Third Suite. In the early 20th century, Luigi Forino arranged the Prelude to the Fourth Suite for Cello Quartet; then Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco arranged the whole of the Sixth Suite for solo cello and strings. Often these arrangements draw out the implied harmonies from Bach’s solo lines, and they do so in a bridge between Bach’s own world and their own, later sensibilities.
Such creative responses to Bach are almost completely unknown and unrecorded, making Giovanni Sollima’s new testament of Bach a uniquely rewarding experience. He has added several brief modern reflections for solo cello, by Steve Hackett, Pancho Ragonese, Umberto Pedraglio, and himself. Thus the history of the solo cello, and of Bach’s masterpieces, comes full circle.
