Books, Arts & Manners: Back-to-Back Bach

OF THOSE who devoted much of their professional lives to the celebration of Johann Sebastian Bach, Pablo Casals was and is the exemplar. As a measure of that devotion, consider that he studied the Unaccompanied Suites for Cello for 12 years before he played them in public. This was not modesty, for Casals was always aware of his musical stature. But he realized that this work—but a small part of the 45 volumes of the Bach Gesellschaft—was a kind of unbuttoning of the Baroque cello that could only be adequately transmitted from the mind to the fingers by getting to the core of its complex thought. Otherwise it would be simply a room-emptier.

Casals once remarked that he preferred the recordings he had made on the old 78-rpm shellacs. The LP eliminated surface noise and the CD brought “digital remastering,” but they lost some of the brilliance and clarity of orthophonic recording in its last days. The EMI reissues of the suites on CD make his point.

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Ralph de Toledano

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OF THOSE who devoted much of their professional lives to the celebration of Johann Sebastian Bach, Pablo Casals was and is the exemplar. As a measure of that devotion, consider that he studied the Unaccompanied Suites for Cello for 12 years before he played them in public. This was not modesty, for Casals was always aware of his musical stature. But he realized that this work—but a small part of the 45 volumes of the Bach Gesellschaft—was a kind of unbuttoning of the Baroque cello that could only be adequately transmitted from the mind to the fingers by getting to the core of its complex thought. Otherwise it would be simply a room-emptier.

Casals once remarked that he preferred the recordings he had made on the old 78-rpm shellacs. The LP eliminated surface noise and the CD brought “digital remastering,” but they lost some of the brilliance and clarity of orthophonic recording in its last days. The EMI reissues of the suites on CD make his point.