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Reviewer:
Peter Quantrill Because she can; and why not? Rachel Podger has earned the right to deal briskly with the rights and wrongs of appropriating the Cello Suites. It was Gustav Leonhardt, no less, who transcribed them for harpsichord (recorded by Roberto Loreggian on Brilliant Classics). Viola players, guitarists and gambists have long hugged them close. Like Leonhardt and Kim Kashkashian (ECM, 10/18) before her, Podger adopts the Suites with bravura and the confidence that while their nature may change, their stature will not be diminished. By shifting the first five Suites up a fifth – the First from G to D and so on – she retains their open-string architecture. Does the transposition come as a wrench? Yes, if the movement between modern and Baroque pitch also unsettles you. Bach’s G major was not ours, and transposition was an indispensable facet of his art as an organist. In B flat, the semitone intervals in the Fourth Suite are (to my ear) counterintuitively wider than the original E flat tonality. Shorter strings allow for graceful ornamentation of gigues beyond the reach of even the most fleet-fingered cellist. Podger treads lightly on the Courante of No 2 where cellists dig deep, but she takes care to preserve the ungainly chords of the same suite’s Minuet. The noble sweep of the Prelude to the Third is replaced by a manner altogether more sprightly, and she lays down a gauntlet with the brusque closing cadence. Freest in form, the Preludes undergo the happiest transformations – taken up the octave, the Prelude to the Sixth sounds more than ever like a shanty – whereas the sarabandes demand all of Podger’s bow control and even then their essential gravity is necessarily modulated with the smile of a more flowing pulse. Now cast in G minor, the Fifth Suite – most contemplative of the six – is drawn into the world of the Sonatas and Partitas. Even here the cello’s body language casts a long shadow, but Fassbaender’s Winterreise followed its own path, and so does Podger’s Bach. |
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