Three years ago, when Alisa Weilerstein played the complete Bach Cello Suites end-to-end at St John’s Smith Square, it sounded as though she had not yet taken full ownership of the music: this exceptional cellist’s eloquence was hobbled by uncertainty of direction and hints of impatience. Now she has recorded the suites – something the 38-year-old admits she had previously intended to put off until she was “much older” – and those uncertainties have been worked out and put away. What emerges is a performance that unfolds at its own pace and in its own space, inward-looking yet confident – one captured at exactly the right time.
And, crucially, it’s a performance that sings: put Weilerstein next to most of her colleagues in these suites (competitors would be the wrong word – Bach doesn’t encourage competition) and she would win for sheer resonance of tone and length of line. There are only a handful of moments in the two and a half hours when the music seems at all hurried, and these are gone almost before they have a chance to register. The recorded sound is ideal – warm but not too echoey, leaving a faint aura around each note.
It’s not a performance that makes a lot of the fact that the movements are named after dances. Granted, the faster ones skip along and she’s not averse to giving them a swing and a kick when the music repeats itself. Yet what seems to drive the music more strongly is the sense of each suite having a public and a private side to its personality, with those faster movements looking outward and the slower ones having an intense inward focus. The longest single movements come in the D major Suite No 6; just as in the concert hall, in Weilerstein’s interpretation this is arguably the highlight, the music emerging with sunlit clarity into its own vast space. There are dozens of recordings of these suites to choose from, but this stands up with the best.
This week’s other pick
Referencing another classic of the string repertoire – Astor Piazzolla’s riff on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons plucks us right away from 18th-century Italy to the bustle of Buenos Aires and the sweat of the milonga. Violinist Katherine Hunka is a dynamic soloist and director with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, and they also offer some elegant Schubert and astringent Schnittke, the latter wittily “staged” via a few extra sound effects.
