Suites 3, 5, 6 - Bach
Inner World - Carl Vine
The first major transition for Bach's solo cello suites in the 20th century was from dry-as-dust, student-fodder studies, to deeply personal emotional expression. It was a transition brought about by the intervention of one man, the great Catalan cellist Pablo Casals. And, in the latter years of the century, the legacy of Casals was, in turn, examined and revitalised.
Players now feel much freer than they used to in acknowledging the suites' origins in dance movements. Heavy personal statements have been yielding to expressions of a lighter hue. And, in the case of a small number of players, the sense of effortful, public oratory, with emphatically pausemarked periods, has been replaced by a style altogether more soft-spoken.
Steven Isserlis is a player who somehow gets the best of both worlds. Only occasionally does he give you the feeling that he's projecting with an audience in a large hall in mind. Mostly he invites his listeners to do the reaching. And even the cough-prone January audience at the NCH last Thursday managed many stretches of rapt silence in which the softness of the cello could be heard competing with the electro-mechanical noises of fans, which few modern venues seem to be free of.
Isserlis has a wonderfully spirit-lifting way of making faster movements dance with a beautifully controlled spring. He can handle rapid passage work to create phrases with breathtakingly long arches. In slow sarabandes he manages, without being particularly slow, to make as if time is standing still. And he engages in all manner of double-stopping and string crossing without fracturing the consistency or continuity of rhythm. And, on top of all that, there's a sense of spiritual probing which would surely have pleased Casals himself. As a Bach player, Isserlis is among the greats.
The last time I heard Isserlis play an evening of Bach he added a short piece by John Tavener, which didn't tear at the mood of the Bach. The Australian composer Carl Vine's Inner World for cello and tape (the tape consisting of computer-processed cello sounds) did. With pop-song-like riffs, harmonica and seagull-like transformations of the cello sound and some clownish interplay between live cello and electronics, Inner World is an obviously populist concert-closer. This time, sad to say, it got a warmer welcome than the Bach which preceded it.
