Bach’s Cello Suites represent a spiritual meditation — from the Nativity to the Resurrection

‘One player on four strings, with a bow.’ That’s what Bach’s six Cello Suites boil down to, says Steven Isserlis. It sounds simple enough, until you add more than 100 editions and 200 recordings into the equation, not to mention countless books, chapters and articles all wrestling with a work Isserlis calls ‘a Bible’ for cellists. And this tussle isn’t just a lofty question of meaning or interpretation either: we’re still arguing about the actual notes. Suddenly the numbers no longer add up.

The cellist Isserlis released his award-winning account of the Cello Suites in 2007. That Hyperion disc (still quietly revelatory, whatever his self-deprecating, occasionally rueful footnotes might suggest) is both the prelude and afterword to the book that now follows. But what seems at first like an elegant extended programme note — an essay that dutifully takes in biography, context, genesis and analysis — smuggles something far more unusual along with it. It’s not a theory, Isserlis stresses, but rather an ‘instinctive reaction’ that carries all the weight of one without its burden. More of that presently.

First Isserlis does his due diligence. We hurtle through the composer’s life and career with plenty of energy (and perhaps more exclamation marks than are strictly necessary), including some spicy anecdotes about brawls and women. But it’s far from facile; this is Isserlis’s way of reminding us of Bach the man — that the veneration we feel for his music is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Whether it’s the suspicion of Bach’s ‘mediocre’ skill by the Leipzig authorities, scholarly criticism of his ‘turgid, over-intellectual’ style or the countless scores carelessly lost, leaving the Cello Suites unpublished until 1824 and unrecorded until 1936, the music is gently removed from its display case and reframed as part of the everyday fabric of life and changing fashions.