Cello Suite in Eb major J.S. Bach

Last week I performed Bach's cello suite in Eb major for a local concert. I've played Bach's suites many times in bits and pieces but I've never performed a whole one before, and the process of going past learning the actual piece and creating a sense of identity for each movement along with a good aesthetic balance between them was a really interesting creative process.

I made a full recording a few days before the concert to ramp up the pressure and thus isolate the weak spots in my preparations - the key weak spot turned out to be the movement I thought I knew the best. I came back and recorded this (the Bourees) again but the rest is the best take of two of each movement as I recorded on the day, with a sneaky splice in the middle of the Prelude.

Prelude - this is remarkably similar in vibe to the first prelude from the Well Tempered Klavier, but has a really oddly Eastern sounding interlude in the middle which is almost operatically dramatic. I deliberately used much more of a darker d-string tone through this section along with a bit of tasto. I quite like the little slide up to a unison on the cadential trill that leads into the recap, no doubt very inauthentic...

Allemande - I bowed a lot of this backwards (up-bows on down-beats and vice versa) to make it a bit more bouncy. I also tried to bring out the harmonically important notes with down-bows regardless of what part of the bar they fell on. This became a bit of a test-case for the Gigue later on. I have a soft spot for the Allemandes in the Bach suites.

Courante - a proper dance with lots of fancy runs and 2/3/4 rhythmic juxtapositions. Just a bit of fun.

Sarabande - not choking the three note walk up to the spread chord is key, along with preserving melodic integrity through the double-stops.

Bouree - after the first recording I realised that this one is all about call and response, so I used a full tone to contrast a breathy tone, then did some "crescendos" that were more about filling in the breathiness than actually getting louder. Plus some extra twiddles in the endless repeats.

Gigue - this was the most challenging to work out but turned out to be the most fun. I've used a heap of bowing techniques from Irish jigs here, with the second beat pretty often being the accented beat in the bar, and even quite a few uses of a grace-note "flick" to separate repeated notes rather than actually changing bow direction. The use of down-bows to create lively syncopated accents was what this ended up being all about.