Jun 9th 2014

Caressing the arpeggios: Shirley Hunt does Bach’s cello suites

by Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. 

Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.

Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.

You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:

“Portraitures and caricatures:  Conductors, Pianist, Composers”

 here.

The Bach suites for solo cello can leave you suffused, body and soul, with their plangent resonances if you allow them to. These six intimate pieces seem conceived to exploit the sensual nature of the cello.

Since the revival of the suites in the 1990s, cellists have taken them to the concert stage often enough to make them standard repertoire. The CD catalog is replete with personalized interpretations by the great masters of the instrument, including Mstislav Rostropovich, Paul Tortelier, Pablo Casals and Yo-yo Ma. 

Now comes Shirley Hunt from Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her soulful renditions of two of the favorites, No. 1 in G major (BWV 1010) and No. 4 in E flat major (BWV 1007), performed on her baroque William Forster Sr. cello dated from 1775 (Letterbox Arts). This is the first of an ambitious three-CD series.

Ms. Hunt fairly caresses the Bach arpeggios in these first pieces, producing a resonant, singing tone that stays in the mind. Her grandiose opening of No. 4 in E flat major is a stunner, and her sensitive phrasing coaxes what she believes to be Bach’s intentions throughout. The climactic Gigue movement leaves one breathless. The G major was familiar enough upon first hearing to set me humming along with her.

I was sufficiently taken by Ms. Hunt’s high-wire (no net) interpretations that I turned to her program notes to see where she was coming from. Her brief notes are almost poetic as her playing. “Bach has staying power in a world littered with ephemera,” she writes. To experience the suites is to “touch something mysterious and deep, so deep it cannot be named, only felt – as one feels the humming of the earth in a mountain peak or the trunk of a giant sequoia”.

The secret is the open strings on the cello that Bach specified, notably the prelude to No. 1 in G major that calls for resonating G and D, defining, as one critic put it, “the essence of the piece: ringing, soothing, pure, natural”.

I further pursued Ms. Hunt for a few words on the preparation that went into these recordings. She responded that they have been in her repertoire since high school, college and conservatory days. But there is no end to the study of Bach, she says. “There are so many layers to dissect, understand and experience. The scope for interpretation means that Bach has created, in effect, a kind of laboratory in which “each performance or recording opportunity allows different facets of this poetic music to emerge or retreat”. 

She spent a full year concentrating on the three selections on this disc, including seven weeks of total immersion while artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada, a highly regarded “creativity incubator”. Her goal at several performances of these works during her stay was to deliver interpretations that were “never the same twice”.

Technical feats in No. 4 call on great physical discipline, including “lots of complicated finger work to execute even the simplest- sounding passages”, she tells me.  Only a cellist might appreciate that there are few open-string passages in the E flat major suite so that “an incredible amount of endurance is required – something one must practice in the manner of a marathon runner. The object being to train the body to perform over long stretches “with as much grace and ease as possible”.

Ms. Hunt’s playing is also a delight to observe. Regrettably these two suites are not yet up on YouTube but No. 6 in D minor is. I found her elegant, long-fingered technique fascinating to watch while connecting with her personal absorption in the music.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z32OjC4cQwI

Also on this CD is an example of Ms. Hunt’s other main instrument, the viola da gamba, with Ian Pritchard on the harpsichord, playing Sonata No. 3 in G minor (BWV1029). Ms. Hunt said it best. This piece offers “a glimpse of vibrant sociability amongst musical lines, a balanced cup brimming with ebullient chatter and cascades of splendid counterpoint”.

The cello suites have inspired interesting variations from major composers, bringing the full keyboard to bear – including piano accompaniment by Robert Schumann and complete transcriptions Leopold Godowsky. Some other reworkings are on the goofy side (the tuba, ukelelee).

The Cinema has not overlooked the dramatic impact hidden inside the cello’s sonorities. Susan Sarandon literally sets her cello on fire in The Witches of Eastwick and Jack Nicholson convincingly plays her accompanist and mentor, among other things. “Let it out,” Nicholson implores. And she does. 

A slightly more subdued role of the cello is in Christopher Walken’s hands in A Late Quartet. Sarandon and Walken needed extensive tutoring to fake the fingerings and body language but the sound track by professionals made the most of the cello’s growling, soaring, not to say erotic, potential.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF6FluTRdD0&list=PLPWZv5--hK0umufCgZif5otVN5h-557x_

Ms. Hunt ranges widely in the solo and ensemble repertoire but for her, Bach is in a class by himself. As she put it, Bach offers the “infinite possibility and continual promise of renewal and refreshment through repeat listening, repeat performances and even new and inventive arrangements”.




The CD is available at www.letterboxarts.com:


 


This article is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Facts & Arts neither receives information about you, nor of your donation, nor does Facts & Arts receive a commission.

Facts & Arts does not pay the author, nor takes paid by the author, for the posting of the author's material on Facts & Arts. Facts & Arts finances its operations by selling advertising space.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Music Reviews

Mar 15th 2018

The Brahms Scherzo Op. 4 opens with a delicate and playful theme, then carries us along on waves of emotion swinging from the filigree, to the lyrical, the thunderous, and back to the delicate.

Mar 9th 2018

Perhaps enough time has passed since the death of the famous French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger to step back and question her musical sainthood. After all, she was only human. 

Feb 21st 2018

A new “electronic opera” from Ireland, “Heresy”, broke new ground in contemporary opera a couple of years ago, bringing together Irish vocal talent and the synthesized music of much-decorated composer Roger Doyle.

Feb 4th 2018

Elegant, poised and deeply musical Ran Jia has brought a new freshness to the Franz Schubert piano sonatas, a phenomenal achievement considering how often they have been performed by the greatest pianists of the past 75 years.

Jan 31st 2018

American expat pianist David Lively found happiness in Paris as a teen-aged piano prodigy and got so busy performing and studying  -- with an Alfred  Cortot associate -- that he ended up making his life in France, a “different planet” culturally, he says, compared to that of his native land. 

Jan 26th 2018

When young French pianist François Dumont appeared at the Salle Gaveau in Paris recently, the critics embraced him without reserve. One wrote that his recital “confirmed his place in the family of the best musicians in France”.

Jan 13th 2018

Nearly two hours of Debussy’s solo piano music at one sitting can be, for some, too much impressionistic color to digest. And indeed a woman beside me fell asleep during the twelve Préludes, Book One.

Nov 29th 2017

In the world of classical music trios, there are few combinations as natural as the cello, guitar and piano. Operating mostly in the same register, attacking and retreating equally, the instruments can blend beautifully if played with discipline and heart. 

Nov 3rd 2017

A California polymath has electrified the music world with his images of classical music in visual form, capturing more than 165 million hits on his Internet postings in just a few years.  Only pop singers or weird videos do better. 

Oct 30th 2017

Ukrainian-born Evgeny Ukhanov, based in Australia for the past 20 years, is an established performer of new music originating in his adopted homeland. Now he has teamed up with friend and Melbourne composer Alan Griffiths on a new CD of selections regrouped under the title “Introspection”. 

Sep 9th 2017
 

If music makes you happy or sad, you are probably an average listener. If it leaves you indifferent, you might be considered insensitive. But if it gives you goosebumps you are in a very special group with connections in your brain anatomy that others may never feel.

Aug 31st 2017

Lake Como, known as the “magic lake” of Italy, has inspired writers and composers for centuries with natural surroundings so conducive to creative expression.

Aug 16th 2017
File 20170815 15219 g8geue

Much of the mythology that surrounds Elvis Presley, who died 40 yea

Aug 2nd 2017

Katia and Marielle Labèque -- the glamorous French keyboard siblings -- have achieved a solid legacy of exuberant performances in the two-piano repertoire, ranging from experimental contemporary works to traditional classical-romantic composers.

Jun 24th 2017

I was flipping through my copy of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 6 recently and spotted his two “col pugno” markings. My memory took me back many years to the day I first encountered these violent directions. At the time, I didn’t know what to think.

Jun 21st 2017

One of the world’s greatest living violinists, Maxim Vengerov, accompanied by an equally accomplished pianist Roustem Saïtkoulov, dazzled a full house at the 18th century Grand Théâtre of Bordeaux Sunday night (18 June) with a faultless concert.

Jun 17th 2017

A classical-trained German pianist working in a range of musical disciplines has just launched his most audacious experiment yet – an original piano sonata consisting almost entirely of creations from his unconscious mind.

Jun 5th 2017

The Orchestre National de Bordeaux Aquitaine added another feather to its cap last week (June 1-2) with the engagement of a leading international guest conductor, Michail Jurowski, who led the ONBA in two demanding orchestral pieces, the Shostakovich Symphony No.

May 24th 2017

Taking a break in gaps between a Mozart piano concerto in Izmir, Turkey, (No. 9, “Jeunehomme”), a recording session of three Mozart concertos in Rennes, France (Nos.