Toshio Hosokawa, Johann Sebastian Bach, Isang Yun, Thomas Demenga

This double album completes the Bach project that Swiss cellist Thomas Demenga began for ECM New Series in 1986: the six Cello Suites, recorded over the years and each time set beside contemporary chamber music. For the final instalment the Fifth and Sixth Suites meet two composers from East Asia, the Japanese Toshio Hosokawa (born 1955) and his Korean teacher Isang Yun (1917-1995). Both wrote from the meeting point of Eastern and Western musical thought, and the pairing makes the Suites sound unexpectedly open-ended.

The set gathers recordings from fifteen years. Hosokawa's pieces and the Fifth Suite were recorded in November 2000 at the Kirche Blumenstein, while the Sixth Suite and Yun's Gasa and Espace I date from December 1998. Yun's Images was taped by Radio DRS in Zürich in July 1985. Alongside Demenga play the accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti, the violinists Asako Urushihara and Hansheinz Schneeberger, the pianist Thomas Larcher, the flautist Aurèle Nicolet and the oboist Heinz Holliger. Manfred Eicher produced the album.

The first disc begins with Hosokawa's In die Tiefe der Zeit (1994/96) for cello and accordion, twenty-one minutes of long tones in which the cello draws a high line over the accordion's thin sustained chords. His Duo for violin and cello (1998) builds silences into the sound, and Winter Bird (1978) is for solo violin. The Fifth Suite in C minor follows. The second disc opens with the Sixth Suite in D major, then turns to Yun: Gasa (1963) for violin and piano, the late Espace I (1992) for cello and piano, and Images (1968) for flute, oboe, violin and cello.

In The Strad, Catherine Nelson wrote that placing the Suites beside "such far-flung musical languages" makes one "listen afresh to these familiar treasures", and praised Demenga's "refined, delicate style and minimal vibrato." Tarik O'Regan in The Observer called it a "superb double-CD set", with Bach played in "elegant period interpretations" between the modern works. Earlier volumes of the cycle had paired the Suites with Elliott Carter, Heinz Holliger, Sándor Veress and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, as Die Zeit noted in its review.

Double CD, ECM New Series 1782/83, first released in June 2002, with a 56-page booklet including notes by Oswald Beaujean.