On this double album the Swiss cellist Thomas Demenga records Bach’s six suites for unaccompanied cello, BWV 1007-1012, for the second time. Between 1986 and 2002 he had taped them for ECM New Series one at a time, each paired with contemporary music. Those albums belong to the early history of the series. This set is devoted to Bach alone. It distils years of study of the source manuscripts and of tempos, embellishments, fingerings and bowings, all aimed at the core of the music.
The recording was made in February 2014 at the Hans Huber-Saal in Basel, with Laurentius Bonitz as engineer and Manfred Eicher as executive producer. It was released on 27 October 2017. Demenga plays with gut strings and a Baroque bow. The booklet essay by Thomas Meyer appears in German and in an English translation by Paul Griffiths. His first cycle had set the suites beside works by Elliott Carter, Heinz Holliger, Sándor Veress, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Toshio Hosokawa and Isang Yun. “To me, Bach is the greatest musical genius who has ever lived,” Demenga says in ECM’s notes on this release.
The suites run in numerical order, the first three on the first disc and the last three on the second. Demenga treats them as suites of dances and lets in ornaments and a measure of rubato without pushing either to an extreme. In Fono Forum, Ole Pflüger pointed to his range of bow strokes, used to imitate hoarse, smoky or whispering voices. He also noted how clearly the dialogues Bach wrote into a single line come through. The Sixth Suite in D major closes the set and contains its longest movement, an Allemande of more than eight minutes.
Reviewers heard a reading that rethinks the first cycle rather than repeating it. Rob Cowan in Gramophone described the 2014 sessions as “a complete rethink” and welcomed the interpretative freedom Demenga now allows himself. In The Boston Globe, Jeremy Eichler praised “tastefully ornamented, light-filled readings” that treat the suites both as courtly dances and as confessions of the soul. James Manheim of AllMusic admired the close, clean sound. He warned that listeners who hear the suites as murmurings of the inner soul may find these readings too outgoing.
This is the double CD edition, ECM New Series 2530/31, first released in 2017.
