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J. S. Bach: 6 Solo Suites

20,00 $ – 38,00 $

Erling Blöndal Bengtsson
When at the age of three Erling Blöndal Bengtsson was given a violin by his father, his immediate instinct was to position it between his knees. However much his father protested, he could not be persuaded to hold it under his chin. The boy was adamant, and just six months later he gave his first public recital, on a viola with an end-pin attached to it. Seven years later he was allowed to make his debut with an orchestra in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Concert Hall where, in the summer of 1992, Erling Blöndal Bengtsson was celebrated on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. the fifthieth anniversary of his debut, and as the greatest living Danish cellist – il not one of the finest anywhere, with his bright slender tone, at once elegantly nimble and glowing with concentration and pained recognition.
“The born cellist” is no hackneyed cliché when applied to Blöndal Bengtsson. He found it all so easy that he could make do with one hour’s practice a day as a child – and indeed no more was asked of him by his violinist father and exceptionally musical mother, an Icelandic woman straight out of the ancient sagas.
In 1948, just sixteen years old, Erling Blöndal Bengtsson travelled to Philadelphia to take up studies with the pre-eminent cellist of the time, the Russian-born Gregor Piatigorsky. Just one year later he became Piatigorsky’s assistant at the Curtis Institute of Music, and the year after that he had succeeded him as teacher at the Institute.
He stayed in the United States for five years before letting himself be tempted back to a teaching job at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. He was appointed professor at the age of 29, and has during the course of a career spanning almost 40 years become a role-model for a whole family of young cellists playing in Denmark and abroad, while at the same time tending his own soloist career.
Between 1958 and 1978 he was also attached to the Swedish State Radio School of Music in Stockholm; he was a professor at the Musiklochschule in Cologne from 1978 to 1982, and continues regularly to give masterclasses at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, at Aldeburgh, Sion, and in Scandinavia.
In 1990 he moved back to the United States to take up a professorship at one of North America’s leading centres of music, The University of Michigan School of Music in Ann Arbor.
Blöndal Bengtsson’s repertoire is just as all-encompassing as his teaching activitics. Much of it has been recorded: the complete Bach solo suites and the Beethoven sonatas, solo works by Reger and Ysaye, cello concertos by Boccherini, Haydn, Schumann, Dvorak, Lalo, Saint Saëns and Tchaikovsky, but also much contemporary music. His insatiable curiosity about modern music has resulted in the first performance of a number of Scandinavian cello concertos, many of which are also dedicated to him, including thoof Niels Viggo Bentzon, Vagn Holmboe, Herman D. Koppel, Jan Maegaard (due for release) and Jon Nordal. He has played the Danish premieres of concertos by Britten, Barber, Khatchaturian, Delius, Lutoslawski and Walton, and indeed the latter two have themselves conducted performances with Blöndal Bengtsson as soloist.
For a number of years he has been playing 60 – 70 concerts a year, in Europe, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, and he has appeared with all the main Scandinavian orchestras and numerous foreign ones, including the Royal Philhilmonic, BBC Symphony, St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) Philharmonic, and the Salzburg Mozarteum, with conductors such as Sir Malcolm Sargent, Pierre Monteux., Nicolai Malko, Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, Paavo Berglund, Sixten Ehrling and Yuri Temirkanov.
And Blöndal Bengtsson’s audiences value him. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and has been awarded the Danish “Discophile” prize of 1958 and the Hyam Morrison Medal for Cello in Gold in 1957, among many other prizes. He is also First Knight of the Danish Order of Dannebrog, and Commander of the Icelandic Order of Falcon.

Lotte Bichel

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SKU: DACOCD 331-332 Categories: , , ,

CD 1
Johann Sebastian Bach
Suite No. 1 in G Major BWV 1007
1. Prélude
2. Allemande
3. Courante
4. Sarabande
5. Menuet I – II
6. Gigue

Suite No.3 in C Major BWV 1009
7. Prélude
8. Allemande
9. Courante
10. Sarabande
11. Bourrée I – II
12. Gigue

Suite No. 5 in C minor BWV 1011
13. Prélude
14. Allemande
15. Courante
16. Sarabande
17. Gavotte I – II
18. Gigue

CD 2
Suite No. 2 in D minor BWV 1008
1. Prélude
2. Allemande
3. Courante
4. Sarabande
5. Menuset I – II
6. Gigue

Suite No. 4 in E flat Major BWV 1010
7. Prélude
8. Allemande
9. Courante
10. Sarabande
11. Bourée I – II
12. Gigue

Suite No. 6 in D Major BWV 1012
13. Prélude
14. Allemande
15. Courante
16. Sarabande
17. Gavotte I – II
18. Gigue

Erling Blöndal Bengtsson – cello

6 Solo Cello Suites ©

ln 1717 Johann Sebastian Bach left Weimar, where he had been organist and chamber musician at the strictly Protestant Court of Duke Wilhelm Ernst since 1708. There he had composed a number of his organ works and church cantatas, but with time the initially happy relationship with the Duke had cooled somewhat, so it was with the best expectations that he took up a position with the music-loving Prince  Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. The music Situation in Köthen was completely different from the one Bach had known in Weimar and was to meet again upon becoming Cantor at St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig in years to come. The court at Köthen was Reformed and adhered as such to the principle objections of Calvinism to decoration of any nature of the church interior and service, which meant that the musical activities of the church were limited to the Psalms, sung either in unison or in simple four part arrangement without organ accompaniment. On the other hand the Court at Köthen attached that much more value to purely instrumental music and had its own orchestra of some twenty able musicians.
A substantial part of Bach’s orchestral and chamber works were composed here, including the six Brandenburg Concertos (which were dedicated to the Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg but which received their first performance at Köithen), two of the four orchestral suites, a large number of transcriptions of pieces by other composers, Vivaldi amongst them, the two violin concertos and double violin concerto, and sonatas for flute, violin and viola da gamba. Among the solo works composed here are the flute partita, the three sonatas and three partitas for violin, part one of Das wohltemperierte Klavier, the French and English suites for harpsichord and the six cello suites, which were in all likelihood witten tbe the respected first cellist at the Court, Christian Ferdinand Abel.
Like the violin the cello is an instrumental innovation from the middle of the sixteenth century. One of the first violin makers, Andrea Amuti, made an alto and e tenor/baritone instrument along the same outer lines, the viola and the cello respectively to accompany it as had been the case with other families of instruments during the Renaissance and baroque periods. However, for a long time the cello was mainly used for reinforcing figured bass accompaniments, and not until about 1690 was the cello accorded a solo part of its own, in the work Ricercari by the composer Domenico Gabrielli of Bologna. Soon afterwards however, other composers including Vivaldi greatly advanced the scope of the instrument, and Bach’s solo suites from around 1720 can be said to have marked a new departure for the cello and its literature.
But despite their central position in the history of cello playing Bach’s suites would not appear to have made much of an impact on his own age, and indeed even after their publication after Bach’s autograph version in the complete edition of his works (Alfred Dörffel, vol. XXVII, 1. 1879) it was quite some time before cellists really took them to their hearts. In fact, even though the suites in many respects open a new world to the cello as a solo instrument, it was not until the thirteen-year-old Pablo Casals found Friedrich Grützmacher’s edition from 1878 in a second-hand music shop in Barcelona that the suites attained their position in the standard repenoire – and even then it took the reorientation in the performance of Bach of the 1920’s before they began to be appreciated at their true worth. Until then they had been viewed as cool, academic works and Casals alone had ventured to perform them in their entirety, with all the repeats, instead of just the odd movement such as the popular Bourrée from the C Major suite.
Outwardly, the suites are built along classic baroque lines. All six comprise the fixed, stylized dance movements of the suite: Allemande, Courante. Sarabande and Gigue and with the insertion of extra movements between the Sarabande and Gigue: in the first two suites a pair of Minuets, in the middle two Bourrées, and in the final two, Gavottes. The first four suites were composed for a cello tuned as was generally accepted already in Bach’s day: C G d a. The fifth, which Bach himself later adapted for the lute, makes use of scordatura in that the a – string is to be retuned to g, a direction not generally followed today. And the sixth was written for a still somewhat enigmatic five-stringed instrument, tuned C – G- d – a- e1, so that the original music is not immediately applicable for the nomal, four-stringed cello; however it is of the same character as the other five suites, and Bach himself included it in the autograph version he left behind him.
All the suites except the fifth begin with a prelude in free style and based on broken chords in a markedly rhapsodic progression. The introductory movement of the fifth suite, in C minor, is a regular French overture of the type German composers of the end of the seventeenth century had adopted from France. It starts with a very pronounced dotted section which is followed by a faster part during which Bach emphasizes the fugal principle so characteristic of the French overture. The gravity of the Allemandes in their moderate tempo, almost approaches the pathetic, putting them into stark contrast to the spirited Courantes and the gay and instrumentally vivacious Gigues. Throughout the dance movements – more so than in the preludes – Bach uses double stopping and three- and four-part chords to great effect, particularly in the expressive Sarabandes.
There was no-one to follow in Bach’s footsteps as a composer for the cello, as in many other areas. Italian music took the lead – particuldy in the field of opera, of course, but even when it came to purely instrumental music, Italy was in the forefront. Sonatas and concertos were written for the cello, and bright and airy ones at that, but not a great many, and it was only with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven that the cello was once again raised to the heights, especially in chamber music. But cello suites in the spirit of Bach were never to be seen again.

Nils Schiørring

RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 1995

CATALOGUE NUMBER: DACOCD 331-332

EAN: 5709499331323

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