Total Page : 336
Publisher : Atlantic Monthly Press
Publication Date : 2009 12 15
>> an Extraordinary and Enlightening Book
What a wonderful journey this book is
How refreshing and rewarding it is to travel with Eric Siblin in his discovery and learning to love these truly wonderful suites and gain more knowledge of them He weaves SO much into this marvelous book including a semi biographical line of Pablo Casals the discoverer of these wonderful pieces as a young cellist and his growing with them practicing daily for many years before ever playing them publicly and recording them for EMI We also get Mr Siblin s personal journey of discovery and fascination with this music cleverly used piece by piece and movement by movement as chapter and sub chapter titles And also the wonderful searching into and documentation of J S Bach s life and likely time frame of composition of these most lovely pieces for solo cello at the time a most neglected instrument Bach ever the genious and consummate artist/creator surely had an insight that no one else of his time shared and how very very fortunate lucky and gifted we are to have in particular these six pieces along with all his other masterly compositions truly one of the greatest musical geniouses ever to grace the planet
Mr Siblin has certainly done ALL his homework before writing this excellent and enlightening book I cannot think of anyone music lovers of course but also anyone interested in history biography and plain discovery who would not be totally caught up in this fabulous journey of the author in his quest to learn more from interviewing cellists listening to many many recordings of the works researching Papa Casals life and journey with this music and also J S Bach and the creation of these wonderful Suites for this truly most expressive and beautiful of all instruments
Kudos to you Eric Siblin for one of the finest reads that I have had the pleasure to enjoy in a very long time
operabruin
>> An Informed Newbie s View of a Classic
It is hard for me to imagine Bach s Cello Suites as absent from my collection of CDs or from the records that I used to have or for that matter from the role of standards within the huge Bach oeuvre They are beautiful jaunty sad and puzzling and meet anyone s definition of fine classical music The truth is though that they dropped away from the world s musical knowledge only partly because the world was slow to understand how much Bach had given it and really didn t surface until the twentieth century when Pablo Casals resurrected them Even then they didn t make any impression on music critic Eric Siblin That s not surprising Siblin had been a pop music critic in Montreal a job that had filled my head with vast amounts of music much of which I didn t want to be there Still in 2000 idle curiosity led him to a performance of the suites mostly because he chanced to be in a hotel near the recital hall The performance was a revelation music more earthy and ecstatic than anything I d ever heard In The Cello Suites J S Bach Pablo Casals and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece Atlantic Monthly Press Sibling tells the welcome stories of the composer the performer and his own growth in understanding of the suites Part of his search is literally for Bach s lost original score for them that s OK but it won t ruin your appreciation of the book to know that if he had found the original there would have been international headlines about the discovery The better part of the search is his growing musical appreciation and fondness for the suites and for their historical lore
Bach was not a musical sensation in his own lifetime His own contemporary Handel was far more famous and Bach never approached the sort of superstardom that Mozart or Beethoven would attain After his death it was the sons that got the manuscripts of his work There are stories that some of his handwritten pages went to the padding to wrap around fruit trees or in a shop for wrapping cheese or even as detritus in a New York City construction site The original manuscript of the Cello Suites has never turned up Bach s wife sometime around 1730 made a copy of the original manuscript to give to a violinist Her copy went from one musician to another winding up in a royal library in Berlin in 1841 where it was mostly ignored The thinking seemed to be that the suites were perhaps technical exercises for cellists not performable pieces Then in 1890 Pablo Casals thirteen years old and a prodigy was looking for music to play rummaging through a sheet music store in Barcelona A tattered copy of the suites caught his eye he had not known that they existed They were to change his life He practiced them every day a routine he would keep up during his long life but it was twelve years before he would perform them in public Casals in exile from Spain refused to play in countries that recognized Franco s government he might have waivered on this pledge in order to enter the US and play at the United Nations but he would not play the Cello Suites which were his spiritual key signature
Siblin s book is a lovely tribute to the suites to Bach and to Casals but it is also a rewarding introduction to classical music itself The classical world was new to Siblin although he can t help commenting on say Bach s influence on Procol Harum or on hip hop and the book would be a fine introduction to give to a young person who might have a first interest in classical music Siblin s descriptions of the music are good though abbreviated Much more fun are his expeditions to put himself into Bach World Interviewing Walter Joachim an 80 year old veteran cellist he got the advice that he should learn to play the cello Not that I could ever be any good he cautioned I was too old for that to ever happen But it would give me some insight And it does he got to play some Bach although not the suites themselves which were simply too intimidating His modest results were sobering but they did bring him closer to appreciating the suites He joined a choir of amateurs spending a weekend learning to sing a Bach cantata for a one off performance Remember what an amateur is literally someone engaged in an activity for the love of it Throughout this sparkling book Siblin the amateur has written intelligently about the Cello Suites as a newbie coming to a fuller appreciation It is an appealingly fresh view of a pinnacle of music
>> Enjoyable intro to Bach and Casals and to the cello suites
Eric Siblin has done a nice job of combining just enough biographical information ie stories about Bach and Casals and the wonderful cello suites with just enough about Eric Siblin He rightly recognizes that Casals and Bach are more interesting than he is which is not always the case in these personal history books
If you re already up on Bach and Casals and the suites you won t find anything new here but the story is charmingly told in a way that interests people not already classical music buffs Siblin has done a service here and had fun doing it
There s a useful bibliography and an unobtrusive set of sourcing footnotes too
The copy editing is lacking for example don t try to find a biography of Casals by i Katz However irritating this and other minor errors may be they don t ruin a very pleasant read
So if you have a nonscholarly interest in Bach in Casals in the cello or in the magisterial Cello Suites you ll enjoy this book and learn from it painlessly
