J. S. Bach: The 6 Cello Suites
Casals crusaded for this music. When he first picked up a used copy of the score in a music store, Bach was not very popular with general audiences, and the cello suites were never played in public. If cellists knew them at all, they used them as finger exercises. After two decades of study, Casals finally gave his first public performances of the suites. For all we know, they may have been the world premieres. Casals thoroughly mastered the music, and by the time he made his recordings, in the 1930s, he gave mature, adept, and loving performances. If his style seems a bit on the romantic side for our 1990s conception of Bach, it is never offensively so. Every music lover should hear this set, with recorded sound that holds up remarkably well. At the same time, we can now realize that Casals sometimes works too hard to make a point, probably knowing that most of his listeners had never heard the music before. So we should also hear more recent recordings of these suites (especiallyStarker's on RCA) for a more inward, subtle version of the music, which is too great to be fully realized in any one performance.--Leslie Gerber