Saturday, January 25, 1pm | Grace Bible Church, Arroyo Grande

Sunday, January 26, 4pm | Pear Valley Estate Wine, Paso Robles

Featuring Nancy Mathison, clarinet, Grace Seng and Valerie Berg-Johansen, violin, Andrew Grishaw, viola, Hilary Clark, cello

BACH’S CELLO SUITES

Symphony of the Vines is completing the cycle of Bach’s Cello Suites. Last season, we presented suites 2, 3 and 4. This program features the Bach’s first and last two suites in the series.  Each artist presents her own vision of these intimate works.  Featuring cellists Jeanne Shumway, Barbara Hunter-Spencer, and Hilary Clark.

Bach’s Cello Suites are some of the most emotionally intense pieces in the Baroque repertoire, making the most of the emotional depth of a solo cello and using a wide range of complex playing techniques.

There are six suites in all, each with six movements, each of which acts like a musical conversation – high passages are echoed by reflective low playing, and dense chords accompany delicate ornamental flourishes. The most famous movement, the ‘Prelude’ from Suite No. 1 in G, is a great example of Bach’s genius; there is no accompaniment, but the harmony plays out note-by-note like a musical journey, as chords are implied over the course of a bar rather than played.

Interestingly, there are no tempo markings for any of the movements given by the composer. Therefore, it is up to the performer to choose the suitable pulse for her interpretation.

 Suite No. 1 – Jeanne Shumway

Suite No. 5 – Barbara Hunter-Spencer

Suite No. 6 – Hilary Clark

For such a popular set of works, it is amazing how little we know about the genesis of the Cello Suites. Bach’s manuscript of them is lost, with little chance it will ever be found. So musicians have relied on a copy written out by his second wife, Anna Magdalena.

It’s perhaps more astounding that these amazing works weren’t widely known before the 1900s, and were merely dismissed as studies. 

The Cello Suites are an integral part of the cello repertoire. Most well-known cellists regard performing and recording the whole set as a milestone in their career. 

The Suites for Unaccompanied Cello

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

Born March 21, 1685, Eisenach

Died July 28, 1750, Leipzig

Bach’s six suites for unaccompanied cello date from about 1720, when the composer was kapellmeister (director of music) and working for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen in Leipzig,

Germany.  Bach did not play the cello, and it may well be that he wrote these suites for Christian Ferdinand Abel, cellist in the Köthen orchestra and one of the best cellists in Europe. Abel and Bach became good friends (Bach was the godfather of one of Abel’s sons), and almost certainly the two worked together as these suites were composed: Bach would have asked him what was possible and what was not, what worked and what didn’t, and so on.  The result is music for cello that is very idiomatically written but also supremely difficult, and all by itself this music may tell us how high the standard of music-making was in the Cöthen court when Bach was there.  Bach’s suites for solo cello remained for years the property of a handful of connoisseurs–they were not published until 1828, over a century after they were written.

Bach understood the term “suite” to mean a collection of dance movements in the basic sequence of allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue, which is the same sequence of movements of his instrumental partitas.  But Bach added an introductory prelude to all six cello suites, and into each suite he interpolated one extra dance movement just before the final gigue to make a total of six movements.  All movements after the opening prelude are in binary form.

Bach’s cello suites have presented performers with a host of problems because none of Bach’s original manuscripts survives.  The only surviving copies were made by Bach’s second wife and one of his students, and – lacking even such basic performances markings as bowings and dynamics – these texts present performers with innumerable problems of interpretation.  In a postscript to his edition of these suites, Janos Starker notes that one of the pleasures of going to heaven will be that he will finally be able to discuss with Bach himself exactly how the composer wants this music played. In the meantime, individual performers must make their own artistic decisions, and these suites can sound quite different in the hands of different cellists.