July 4, 2009: Reproducing history

Many of my contributions to the "Great Recession" series of articles have addressed "the concert experience through recordings;"  and I gave considerable attention to the "economic value" of listening to performances by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich through the Complete EMI Recordings box of 25 CDs, which included many recordings from Rostropovich's Russian years made in concerts before live audiences.  EMI has just released a similar box of complete recordings by the cellist Pablo Casals.  This is a more modest collection of only 9 CDs;  and it appears as if all recordings were made in studio, rather than before a "live" audience.  Nevertheless, these sessions date from a time when recording had not yet become the technology-driven process of crafting an artifact from a myriad of takes, often made over the course of several days.  Thus, given how few recordings of Casals are available and given that Casals himself took satisfaction in these recordings, this collection may, in many ways, be preferable to (and more economical than) the two boxes of live recordings from the Festivals at Prades made available from the Music & Arts Program label (Volume 1 and Volume 2).  Most importantly, the emphasis in the EMI collection is strictly on Casals, rather than all the other performers who came to Prades.

Of particular interest from a comparative point of view are the two EMI CDs of the six unaccompanied cello suites of Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 1007–1012).  Unlike the Rostropovich recordings, made over the course of a sustained visit to Vézelay Abbey in March of 1991, the Casals recordings were made between November 25, 1936 and June 19, 1939.  The second and third suites were recorded in 1936 at the Abbey Road Studios in London, and the remaining suites were recorded at an unspecified location in Paris.  (By way of a footnote, this was the first time that the suites had been recorded in their entirety.)  While, as I have previously observed, the Rostropovich recordings provide an interesting perspective on the relationship between a soloist and the nature of the physical setting, the Casals recordings deal more with the relationship between the soloist and the music, with the setting abstracted out of the picture, so to speak.

If there is any disadvantage to the Casals collection, it is that each sonata is performed only once.  We know from Bernard Greenhouse's recollections of his studies with Casals that Casals took an improvisatory approach to performing Bach.  On the other hand we have the opportunity to appreciate an important episode from those recollections, as documented in Nicolas Delbanco's book, The Beaux Arts Trio.  Here is Delbanco's transcription of his interview with Greenhouse:

I was studying the Bach D Minor Suite and he demanded that I become an absolute copy. At one point I did very gingerly suggest that I would only turn out to be a poor copy of Pablo Casals, and he said to me, "Don't worry about that. Because I'm seventy years old, and I will be gone soon, and people won't remember my playing but they will hear yours." It turned out of course that he lived till the ripe old age of ninety-seven. But that was his way of teaching. …

And after several weeks of working on that one suite of Bach's, finally, the two of us could sit down and perform and play all the same fingerings and bowings and all of the phrasings alike. And I really had become a copy of the Master. It was as if that room had stereophonic sound—two cellos producing at once. And at that point, when I had been able to accomplish this, he said to me, "Fine. Now just sit. Put your cello down and listen to the D Minor Suite." And he played through the piece and changed every bowing and every fingering and every phrasing and all the emphasis within the phrase. I sat there, absolutely with my mouth open, listening to a performance which was heavenly, absolutely beautiful. And when he finished he turned to me with a broad grin on his face, and he said, "Now you've learned how to improvise in Bach. From now on you study Bach this way."

When I analyzed this text on my blog this past January, I concluded that Casals believed that one could not improvise on a composition until one had learned to listen to that composition.  If one aspires to perform these suites, one probably cannot apply Casals' method of imitation strictly on the basis of recordings:  Greenhouse had to study all of Casals' physical processes associated with the sounds that resulted.  However, those of us who aspire to be no more than informed listeners can definitely acquire a sense of what it means to listen to Bach, particularly when we now have the opportunity to experience the Casals approach side-by-side with that of Rostropovich.

There are many other listening experiences that reside in the CDs of this new Casals collection;  but, given the importance of the Bach suites in the cello repertoire, I feel that these two CDs deserve particular attention!