In essence all recordings are confections, even, perhaps especially, when they strive after the illusion of naturalism. Anyone who fails to respond the achingly beautiful account of the E flat Sarabande I would suspect of pedantry for pedantry’s sake. I would argue against those latter listeners that whether they like it or not, there is nothing gimmicky about this enterprise since both performance and production are clearly born of great respect for as well as love of this music. I suspect this record will prove musical Marmite: for everyone who like me loves it there will be others who recoil from it as a gimmick. I would love to hear the same technique applied to the fugues of the Bach solo violin music. At times it is reminiscent of a consort of cellos. One advantage of this approach is that, as in the Gigue of the D minor suite, each voice can be given its own subtly distinct acoustic to help the listener to follow the different strands of Bach’s polyphony. Conventional is not a word I would apply to the joyous buzz of strings that accumulates as her version of that movement proceeds. In other movements, an example would be the bustling Gigue of the C major suite, her speed is utterly conventional.
In this instance, the slow speed allows Beiser to exploit the resonant potential of the open strings to such a marvellous effect that the tempo quickly becomes irrelevant. Some of the tempi, as with the Prelude of the fourth suite, are strikingly slow. Is this then an old-fashioned view of these suites? Again the answer is ambiguous. By which, I mean that it conjures up some of the greatest of Bach recordings as I listened. Another grand old man of the past, Otto Klemperer and his legendary Philharmonia recording of the St Matthew Passion popped into my head as I listened to the overlapping cello lamentations of the Sarabande of C minor suite. There is definitely something orchestral about the depth of the sound which draws the listener into the emotional heart of Bach. Curiously, my first thought listening to the Prelude of the D minor suite was of Stokowski’s Bach arrangements. But as I listened I found myself drawn into their magical web of sound. My initial experiences of sampling this recording were to worry that this project was a missed opportunity falling between two stools – neither sufficiently true to the score to compete with mainstream recordings nor adventurous enough to justify the efforts of cellist and producers. In others, the results amount to a reinvention. In some movements their interventions are limited to provided deep resonant sound. Everything that is added is a sincere, tasteful and sensitive response to the nature of the originals. The first thing to say is that Beiser and her engineer and long-term collaborator Dave Cook do not overdo things.
The unfaithful takes the form of playing around with the audio, picking up features of the acoustic, layering the sound and so on. The faithful part of the equation is an insightful and straightforward rendition of these scores. Now she brings her contemporary music sensibilities to the performance of the complete set.
As she mentions in her introduction to this project, even when preparing contemporary pieces her practice ritual is that she has always commenced with a movement from the Bach suites. Beiser is normally involved in the performance of contemporary music and has a particular interested in the opportunities to manipulate sound that a modern studio affords. In comparison to the hundred and one different takes on it, that by Maya Beiser is simultaneously faithful and unfaithful. All manner of things have been done to these works over years, particularly the famous prelude to the G major suite that opens the set. This is not just another recording of the much-taped Bach cello suites.
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Reviewed as a digital download from a press preview
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