Kim Kashkashian J.S. BACH Six Suites for Viola Solo BWV 1007 - 1012

Here are Bach’s six cello suites, played on the viola by one of the instrument’s greatest exponents, Kim Kashkashian.

Bach composed the suites around 1720 when he was in the employ of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen.  The autograph manuscript is no longer extant, and the earliest known copies date from 1726 and 1730, the latter made by Anna Magdalena Bach. 

Hearing the Suites on the viola, with its range an octave above the cello, Paul Griffiths remarks in the liner notes, the music takes on “a different kind of sombreness, a different kind of dazzlement, a different kind of self-examination.” His essay details the characteristics of the suites and the dance forms – the allemandes, courantes, sarabandes, minuets, bourrés, gavottes and gigues - and emphasises Kashkashian’s sense of pulse, which “comes from the music, not from the clock. Bach’s dances are not for jaunting feet but made rather of shapes and images moving in the mind.”

Kim Kashkashian approaches the suites as a player whose sensibilities have been shaped by engagement with new music as well as classical tradition. For these performances she uses contemporary instruments, including a 5-string viola (as called for in the Anna Magdalena Bach manuscript) for the challenging D major suite, and brings to the whole set a feeling of freedom, grace and power. The cello suites have long been part of her performance repertoire, approached from multiple perspectives. (In concert, for instance, inspired by György Kurtág’s insertion of Bach arrangements amid his Játékok pieces, she has sometimes threaded sections of Kurtág’s Signs, Games and Messages in between movements). In her hands, the music is very much alive, and speaks to the present. (ECM Records)