Johann Sebastian Bach, Kim Kashkashian

Kim Kashkashian plays Bach’s six cello suites, BWV 1007-1012, on the viola. In the booklet Paul Griffiths hears in the transfer “a different kind of sombreness, a different kind of dazzlement, a different kind of self-examination”. An ECM New Series artist since 1985, Kashkashian had already recorded Bach’s viola da gamba sonatas for the label with Keith Jarrett on harpsichord. Her solo albums include the Hindemith sonatas and Kurtág & Ligeti: Music for Viola, which won the Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo in 2013.

The suites were recorded in November 2016 and February 2017 at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. Judith Sherman was the engineer, with Manfred Eicher as producer. Kashkashian plays a viola by Stefan-Peter Greiner. For the Sixth Suite, which Bach wrote for a five-stringed instrument, she switches to a five-string viola made by Francesco Bissolotti in Cremona in 1989. The booklet has notes by Griffiths and by Kashkashian, and reproduces pages of Suites II, V and VI from the copy made by Anna Magdalena Bach between 1727 and 1731.

In concert she has interleaved the movements with pieces from Kurtág’s Signs, Games and Messages, but here the suites stand alone. The order is her own. The first disc runs II, I, V, the second IV, III, VI, so the set opens in D minor and the Sixth Suite stays at the end. In The Strad, Carlos Maria Solare wrote that this sequence blurs the cycle’s growing intricacy and throws its variety into relief. He also heard a different tonal shade for every key and every degree of harmonic tension. On the five-string viola, with an added E string, the Sixth gains brightness and reach in its high writing. Jayson Greene in Pitchfork felt the urgency with which she presses against her own tempo in the D minor Prélude.

Greene called these performances “body music, rooted in breath and wood and muscle”. Richard Lehnert of Stereophile wrote of “simply stupendous playing” and of interpretations so free they sound improvised in the moment. BBC Music Magazine gave the set five stars, with Martin Cotton praising its discreetly ornamented repeats and complete technical command. In Die Zeit, Volker Hagedorn joked that Bach must have written the suites while waiting for this violist.

This is the double CD edition, ECM New Series 2553/54, first released in October 2018.