Bach, Casals and The Six Suites For Cello Solo - Volume 4: From Tragedy to Transcendence by
Steve Hancoff
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
Bach’s
Six Suites for Solo ‘Cello may be the most performed and recognized compositions ever created for unaccompanied cello. If you close your eyes and think back to a time that you enjoyed more than a few minutes of solo cello, it was probably authored by Bach. You owe it to yourself to also enjoy deeply these guitar transcriptions sublimely delivered by Steven Hancoff and draw from them your future memories. Timbre is the unique quality of an instrument’s sound profile distinct from its pitch and intensity. It is how we recognize the same note from trumpet as that from a piano, yet feel the different source. Soul, I dare say, is a good word for how we know that note is from Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk. The timbre of the guitar brightens the intensity of these melodies and the guitarist’s techniques of harmony and syncopation, so natural to that instrument, amplifies a sonic bouquet of colors within that light like a prism or kaleidoscope does sunshine. The Hancoff soul, where the intelligent, poignant, and transcendent grace of these pieces has been internalized and artfully expressed, makes this the triumph of one man who reached through three centuries to telegraph to us Bach’s soul. I can have almost any music play while I read in my library. My default has been a Steffen Basho-Junghans album for over a year. That has now been replaced by this mentally invigorating three-CD opus.
After discovering an edition in a Barcelona thrift shop in, Spain, a thirteen-year-old Pablo Casals began studying these cello solos until in 1936, at the age of sixty he became the first to record all six suites giving them a holistic rebirth on a recording still respected today: Bach, J. S. The 6 Cello Suites, Pablo Casals. EMI Classics 66215 1997. For those fortunate to discover this interpretation, crafted by Hancoff also at sixty years of age, it too will be respected into the future. Without a Bach manuscript surviving, many interpretations of the suites exist with no authoritative version. Among the scholarship that inevitably followed to fill that knowledge gap, Hancoff has gone far from the idea of mere liner notes to a four-volume, immersive iBook series on Bach and his solo suites: Bach, Casals & The Six Suites for 'Cello Solo in volumes 1 through 4. This is my first experience with iBooks and Hancoff has so embraced the possibilities of the format that I suggest they be enjoyed on a platform like a Mac that can properly present all the dimensions involved here. These books feature images, links to pop up more details, and embedded video and audio.
Volume 1: The Life of J. Sebastian Bach is the biography of a man that knew more than his fair share of pain and like
trummerflora in the wasteland of the Thirty Years War went from orphaned seed to organ master. He was a well paid and celebrated organmeister (tester, performer, if unrecognized composer) and settling into a life of serial patronage and a wife in second cousin Maria Barbara Bach. The biography starting in Thuringia and from penury to well-paid position jumps to life with the varied content including etchings, commemorating plaques and statues, impressionistic paintings, side treks into “
quodlibets” and “intermezzos”, music theory, and mini-biographies of key persons. It is fascinating that in Weimar, a locus of the German Enlightenment and home of writers Goethe and Schiller, Bach found not only a home but imprisonment. Notably, he was for long not commemorated there he way other key places of his life had done. This is one of the chapters of Bach’s formation that make for interesting reading in Volume 1 as well as explanation of the Bach’s technical advancement innovating well-tempered tuning so that a composer might write in any key, and a musician might play in any key. One of the fascinating intermezzo side treks shows how this well-tempered approach to tones was applied to visual hues by Jakob Weder in his Organ of Color and
Farbsymphonien (“Color Symphonies”). The entertaining diversions to appendices are actually spot on for relevance and generally overtly germane to Bach’s life. One “amazing story” (as some of the addenda are called) is that of Adolph Busch, refugee from Nazi Germany, and the humble story of the creation, loss, and recovery of the Brandenburg Concertos. (As a child, hearing the theme music of “Firing Line” on PBS, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, Third Movement, was the first Bach masterpiece that I came to adore.) Incarceration was not the only misfortune suffered by Bach; multiple of his children also died in infancy. Also, his wife passed. Afterward, Bach authored the cantata
Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis in meinem Herzen (I Had Great Distress in My Heart). For his second wife, Anna Magdalena, he compiled famous clavier pieces as explored here. Volume 1 makes and supports the case of Bach’s deserved acclaim and presents a life with travails and professional success leaving a body of work that is proof of a genius that may have few equals, if any.
Volume II focuses on the accomplished, adult Bach: a grandfather even. Special, detailed interludes add depth. One explores the many portraits of Bach and what they tell us about posture and a possible late-life stroke. However, the numerology of button-counting seems a bit much for me. Another interlude delves into the art of Bach The Younger, many pieces he did being copies of musicians for his grandfather’s collection. Besides lineage there is more in the generations here. Generations of transcriptionists, performers including Casals and such history as revival performances and stunning visuals of inspired painting and sculpture. Hancoff places himself in here and explores his own interpretation:
“…the bow of the cello must be in contact with the string for the string to sound, so that sustain and swell are idiomatically inherent; whereas when a guitar string is plucked, and therefore unless the note is artificially stopped, it will ring and decay, most loud at the first moment of impact, and then progressively softer. Just as important, the guitar will always be an octave higher than a cello. This shift alone generates a different vibratory frequency and, therefore, a different quality of aesthetic and emotional impact. For me, the gorgeous sonority of the cello vibrates more in my belly, that of the guitar more in my chest.”
And later with great humility,
“I hope that I have made a worthy contribution, but confess that my deepest motivation for adapting Bach’s music to my acoustic guitar is the immense pleasure and great good that I derive from prolonged, challenging and creative immersion in the sublime. The Bach Cello Suites are simply too wondrous not to explore. In the end, as I developed my own sensibilities practicing, living with, meditating on, and playing this music, I concluded that it best served the profundity of Bach’s music to let it lead me where it will, and my own nature to follow as best I can. ”
This book takes us to Bach’s death with extensive details on his ophthalmological ailments and the failed eye surgery (and the surgeon) that led to his demise.
Vol. 3 opens with Hancoff’s narration and guitar transcription. Then we are brought into the life of Pablo Casals, a true virtuoso with an immense appetite for life and art. His fortuitous discovery, preservation, and performance of the six cello pieces is integral to their story, now. Near worshipfully, Casals lived with and internalized the pieces as a career. Hancoff observes, “Pablo Casals lived intimately with the Six Suites for Cello Solo for 35 years, practicing them daily. But it was not until he was 59 years old, in the autumn of 1936, that he consented to record them.” This is the story of coming into and becoming these pieces, finally recorded in the late ‘30s on the tumultuous eve of WWII with the fall of Spain to the Fascist forces.
Volume 4 largely explores the depiction of Bach and his art in the visual arts, especially modernist paintings. Wassily Kandinsky, often acknowledged as “The Father of Modern Art,” leads the pack with Fugue, “his seminal expressionist work inspired by the music of Bach”. This volume explores each suite with a video for each featuring the music performed by Steven Hancoff and exploring a theme, such as for V “Discovery & Catharsis” with slideshows of art while the music plays. Each of the many (hundreds?) of images can be popped up to fill the page for a closer look. This is the majority of content for the 1st 48 pages. Longer text then enters the mix with an exploration of the pentagram with its angles of 108° while the Sarabande of Suite V contains exactly 108 notes. From here, the Golden Ratio, Fibonacci, etc. comes up in a delightfully mathematical side trek. It seems significant portions of the other text is from earlier volumes, giving this volume often a retrospective feel.
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