Rating: 5/5
Review:
An excellent recording
I am very impressed by this recording. Perhaps to my shame, I had
not heard Emmanuelle Bertrand before so I approached this with a
little dubiety because there are now so many recordings of the Bach
Cello Suites and I wasn’t sure we needed yet another. I was wrong.
Bertrand is plainly
a wonderful cellist. Her technique is impeccable, so she makes light
of the technical challenges in these wonderful works and makes them
sing and dance delightfully. She also plainly “gets” Bach,
because his dancing rhythms and his fabulous emotional expressiveness
all shine through here. Her tempi are generally on the brisk side
but never inappropriately rushed and she uses rubato with restraint,
thought and care to phrase and give meaning to the music while never
disrupting Bach’s essential pulse. Her approach reminds me
slightly of Paul Tortelier (a very good thing) but she’s her own
woman who puts Bach first but invests the music with her own sense.
There is real
emotional depth here in movements like the Sarabande from the Fifth
Suite, joyous beauty in the Prelude to the Third Suite, delightful
vigour in the closing Gigues, and so on. Bertrand’s cello sounds
fabulous throughout (although the acoustic is slightly over-resonant
in places for my taste). The whole thing is a real pleasure which I
suspect will take its place among my best-loved recordings of the
Cello Suites. Very warmly recommended.
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