Bach: Cello Suites

J.S. Bach’s six suites for solo cello are among the composer’s most exquisite creations. They’re also some of his most enigmatic—we don’t know when or why they were written, or who they were composed for. There are no surviving original manuscripts, no tempo markings in the four sets of copies that do survive, no dynamic indications and very few phrase markings. So, the interpretative possibilities are infinite. “I searched for years for my own approach to Bach,” Anastasia Kobekina tells Apple Music Classical, “because every time I took a lesson or attended a masterclass, everybody had their own way of interpreting Bach. I couldn’t feel that the music was quite mine—until I started playing Baroque cello.” As Kobekina became acquainted with Baroque performance practice, including using authentic gut strings (as opposed to modern—and louder—steel-wound strings), so the Russian cellist began to shake off the rigid performance traditions and conventions of her teachers and peers. “Bit by bit I learned this Baroque language, its dialect and the way to adjust to the nature of gut strings. Playing one chord on gut is so different to playing a chord on steel strings—and that also defines the tempo and the articulation. In Baroque music, you can go wild or you can be very introverted, and it’s still acceptable. The vocabulary is larger in Baroque music than in Romantic repertoire, I would say.” Kobekina’s recording of all six suites possesses an expressive freedom and fragile intimacy that could arguably only be achieved with gut. Pianissimos whisper, fortes bloom, while the lower registers of her two Stradivarius cellos possess a velvety richness. Kobekina pulls and bends tempos, often untethering the music entirely from its time signature, a rhapsodic approach that gives an air of private devotion rather than of public performance. Elsewhere, such as in the Menuets and Gigue of Suite No. 2, or the Allemande of No. 3, the music scampers, nonchalantly and delightfully, its dancing more rustic than courtly. “The Sarabande, generally, is a movement where I feel I can create a certain atmosphere,” says Kobekina. “Maybe it’s because of its pulse, which you can play so much with. And the Sarabande from the Fifth Suite is absolutely unique. There’s nothing like it. I certainly felt the pressure when recording two movements: the Prelude of the First Suite because it’s so famous, and the Sarabande of the Fifth because it’s just so different to any other movement from the suites.” In truth, however, Kobekina sounds utterly at ease with this music, which is surely partly down to the circumstances of the recording itself. A church in Berlin had originally been booked for the sessions, but renovations meant that sessions could only take place at night. “And then I thought that this music was not written to be played in the church,” says Kobekina, “so why not just go into a place where I would feel more comfortable?” The album was eventually recorded in a 100-seat chamber hall, built within the house of the sound engineer’s parents. “It had this beautiful old-style decor, like a little theatre, but I was in the house. And I could literally walk from my bedroom into the hall—it was just one door.” With no travelling time to a studio, and family meals constantly on the stove, the relaxed atmosphere proved perfect for these most personal of works. “There was a luthier [maker of string instruments] in the house next door, too, so I was trying out different bows from him, and also ones that I had brought with me. So it was a very creative process.” All of Bach’s suites demand from their players technical and musical excellence, but there are two that throw unexpected challenges into the mix. Firstly, Suite No. 5 requires something called scordatura, where the cellist is required to tune the highest string, the A string, down a whole tone to a G. This allows chords to be played that would otherwise be impossible to execute cleanly. “In Bach’s time, it was very common practice to change the tuning,” says Kobekina, “and there were not so many fixed ideas. The room for experimentation was much, much larger. But it’s very challenging, and always a bit scary to play in public!” Secondly, it’s widely accepted that Suite No. 6 was composed for a five-string instrument—the music’s range is so high that it makes performance with the traditional four strings challenging for even the very best players. “The type of instrument is not specified—it just says five-string instrument,” says Kobekina. “In my case, I chose to use a piccolo cello with a fifth string, but it was quite challenging to find a nice E-string sound. But I was very lucky to find, just a month before the sessions, the instrument that I used for the recording. And I was so happy, I was so inspired. I think that was the most fun moment for me in the recording is to play the piccolo cello because it was different and it was just so much fun.”