Kevin Barry Room, NCH, Dublin
Bach/Feeley – Cello Suites 4, 1, 3
There were two ghosts at this concert and they were looking over the shoulder of Ireland’s leading guitarist, John Feeley, where they have probably been hovering intermittently over the past number of years.
During that time they will have been keeping an eye on him as he painstakingly wrote down his transcriptions for guitar of Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. On this occasion, Feeley was opening the ninth Guitar Festival of Ireland with a solo recital in which he presented three of the six in his newly published set. The ghosts were those of Bach and of Pablo Casals, the great Catalan cellist responsible for retrieving Bach’s lost masterpieces from obscurity and bringing them to an eager world audience, notably with his recordings in the 1930s.
Plenty of guitar transcriptions already exist, yet the lesser challenge for Feeley’s transcriptions is to please guitarists and guitar audiences. The really daunting task is to satisfy the wider audience – including the two ghosts – who know and love the originals. The English cellist Steven Isserlis describes them as “mysteries” in an effort to convey something of the unique aura in which they are perceived by both players and listeners.
Feeley goes a long way to preserving this aura. While he doesn’t attempt matching the extent to which Bach is committed to the single line in the cello, instead liberally supplementing the melodic line with extra notes that make plain Bach’s often implied harmony, he nonetheless maintains the original’s spirit of unaccompanied, single-instrument miracle.
Uncharacteristically for him there were small mishaps scattered throughout the performance. But these hardly detracted from playing whose prevailing sensitivity and expressivity were so constant and genuine and deep. In particular, the sequence of movements from sarabande through two minuets in the Suite No 1 was so beautiful that it surely laid a couple of ghosts to rest.
