philosophy

The idea of this project is to approach the suites in an informal way. I play them in my practice room, for myself, and that is the setting I think they were intended for. I record them with a simple video camera and publish them on YouTube, the informal medium of this time. I try to do it the best I can, but perfection is not my goal, and neither is sound quality.

Everyone has his own theory about Bach. Some cellists, including my beloved teacher Anner Bijlsma, place great importance on slurs and bowings. I don’t think that’s very important and I adjust the slurs freely to my taste. Actually, I think that’s perfectly OK form a historical point of view.

Recently, a lot has been said about the instrument for which the suites would have been intended. It is now becoming fashionable to perform Bach’s music on a so called violoncello da spalla, usually a very small cello with a terrible sound that is being held on the shoulder. I do have an opinion about this, but for the moment I will not enter the discussion. Serious musicologists have done some research about the violoncello da spalla and I find no evidence in their research that the suites were intended for such an instrument. Besides, I think this too is not a very important subject. I also don’t care too much about things like pitch (I play a=415 for practical reasons), underhand grip or period fingering.

I do care about character and tempo. Baroque cellists play the suites very differently than “main stream” cellist, but both groups are very similar when it comes to the choice of tempo. Most cellists still use the same tempi as Casals on his famous recordings. It seems that somehow these tempi are stored in our collective musical memory. I take a radically different approach: I base my performances on the historical (dance) tempo sources. Because of this, my performances will probably sound very different from what everybody is used to. I’m not asking for approval, just for an open ear...