Bookshelf

Mendelssohn and Victorian England

52Mendelssohn by Colin Eatock
Ashgate
206 pages, illustrations; $99.95 US

German composer Felix Mendelssohn, whose two-hundredth birthday is being celebrated this year, first visited England when he was twenty years old. He made nine more trips before he died in 1847, when he was just thirty-eight years old. It was in England that he scored his earliest successes, and for much of his career he was more appreciated in London than in his hometown of Berlin. In fact, as Colin Eatock writes in this groundbreaking study, “his musical ideals were uncannily aligned with the predominant English tastes of the mid-nineteenth century.”

Eatock, a composer, scholar and journalist who recently became editor of this magazine, paints a vivid picture of Mendelssohn’s visits to England. He describes how many of Mendelssohn’s works were directly inspired by his travels around the British Isles, works like the ‘Scottish’ Symphony, The Hebrides overture, the three Fantasias, which he called his ‘Welsh’ piano pieces, as well as a number of Lieder ohne Worte, including the familiar Frühlingslied. The String Quartet Op.12 was written in London, and the ending of the ‘Reformation’ Symphony came to him at the bottom of a mine in Wales. Mendelssohn immersed himself in English musical life, even accompanying Queen Victoria on the piano as she sang songs written by him and his sister Fanny. No wonder a newspaper of the time called him an ‘adopted son of England.’

But what is even more significant for Eatock than the influence England had on Mendelssohn’s music is the influence Mendelssohn had on British music. Mendelssohn, writes Eatock, “did more to improve the status of music in England than any other continental composer of the nineteenth century.” In fact, he claims, he “shaped the nation’s musical values.” Yet following Mendelssohn’s death, his reputation in Britain declined. Eatock links the shift in attitudes towards his music to growing English nationalism and its unfortunate companion, anti-Semitism – even though Mendelssohn, who was born Jewish, had been baptized as a Lutheran when he was seven years old.

With quotations from contemporary sources, especially Mendelssohn’s letters, detailed footnotes and a useful glossary of names, this fascinating study of Mendelssohn’s ties to England deepens our understanding of his work, and increases our appreciation of his accomplishments.

Pamela Margles, theWholeNote’s regular book reviewer, can be contacted at

bookshelf@thewholenote.com

Bookshelf - September 2009

48_MusicalExoticism

Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections
by Ralph P. Locke
Cambridge University Press
440 pages, photos, musical examples; $110.95

In this rewarding study, Ralph Locke offers a broad-ranging approach to the use of exotic elements in western music. For Locke, who teaches at the Eastman School of Music, it’s not just a matter of examining the notes of a score. Nor is it sufficient to study the context of a work. Equally important are factors like “the particulars of a given performance and the musical and cultural preparation of a given listener.”

By uncovering an expanded range of meanings, Locke’s analysis makes a work with exotic content “more durably enjoyable, continuingly relevant, and perhaps, by the very strength of its musical imagination, healthily problematic.” I can’t think of a work that wouldn’t benefit from such an approach, but nonetheless it pays rich dividends here.

Starting in the baroque with Rameau’s Les Indes galantes, he unearths political issues like colonialism, tyranny, nationalism, and racism, as well as cultural issues like the relationship between folk music and art music. He shows how, in Madame Butterfly (coming up in the COC’s fall season) Puccini used Japanese folk tunes – or what he thought to be Japanese folk-tunes – to make Cio-Cio San “one of the most richly realized characters in the operatic repertoire.” Similarly Locke illustrates how Bizet’s handling of Spanish, Cuban and Gypsy-flamenco themes becomes part of the dramatic structure of Carmen (also on the COC’s fall roster).

Though his main focus is on opera, Locke also looks at piano works like Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and Chopin’s Mazurkas, orchestral works, jazz, popular songs and Broadway musicals like West Side Story (now on stage at Stratford).

Locke’s ultimate concern is how to produce a work with ethnic or exotic colour most effectively. When controversial opera directors like Calixto Bieito relocate an opera, they are in effect removing the exotic elements. And when a contemporary composer like the Argentinian Osvaldo Golijov “merges all too readily the different chosen materials” he is treating a work as if it were “capable, somewhat like a food-processing machine, of smoothing out stubborn tensions between nations and peoples.” For Locke, the solution is “not to rip it apart and rewrite it to suit our own ideas, nor to refuse to perform it, but to get to know it better, contend with its original content and messages, and think about its implications for today.”

48_John Arpin cover_b&w John Arpin, Keyboard Virtuoso
by Robert Popple
Dundurn Press
358 pages, photos; $26.00

Pianist John Arpin could play anything, from opera arias with Maureen Forrester, and his own jazz arrangements with a big band, to solo rags. Yet he never achieved the kind of reputation he deserved, even at home in Toronto. Perhaps it was because he played in so many styles, though biographer Robert Popple blames ineffective marketing, bad luck with insolvent recording companies and a too-gentle personality.

Popple, whose friendship with Arpin dates back over fifty years, is unstinting in his admiration. His familiarity with Arpin’s life makes for lively anecdotes, especially about Arpin’s numerous entanglements with women, many of whom were musicians.

But that closeness with his subject leads Popple to lay on descriptions of Arpin’s genius too thickly. “No other Canadian,” he writes, “has matched his stupendous musical reach – either in breadth or depth, nor has, arguably, any other keyboard musician worldwide.” Then he continues to call Arpin “gifted” or “excellent and proficient” at every turn.

The best material comes directly from Arpin’s own comments, based on Popple’s extensive conversations with him before he died in 2007. Popple quotes them often, and annotates them meticulously in his endnotes. About Glenn Gould, a friend from student days at the Royal Conservatory, Arpin says, “He wasn’t welded in a rigid way to the strict, mechanical setting of the notes that the composer wrote. He’d try things, experiment a lot, and he was constantly analyzing the music, trying to get inside the composer’s mind, always trying to imagine ‘What was he thinking?’ But he couldn’t play anything that wasn’t classical, written right there in front of him.”

We meet interesting figures from the Canadian classical and jazz worlds, like Victor Di Bello, John Arab, Percy Faith, and Ruth Lowe, but we learn little about them. And John Weinzweig is identified merely as a “teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Music”, and American composer Ferde Grofé is referred to as ‘Ferdy Grope’

This is a lively and sympathetic portrait of a seminal figure in Canadian music. Popple’s ability to convey what is special about Arpin’s music led me – to my delight – to listen to Arpin’s recordings of Scott Joplin.

48_Tenor Tenor: History of a Voice
by John Potter
Yale University Press
316 pages, photos; $35.00 US

In 1837, tenor Gilbert-Louis Duprez stunned the audience at the Paris Opera by singing a performance of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell - including the famous high C’s – in full chest voice. As John Potter writes in this fascinating history of the tenor voice, “This was the point of no return for tenors, a change in the very nature of the voice and a defining characteristic of the best (and worst) tenor singing ever since.” It also precipitated one of the most tragic episodes in operatic history. Potter chronicles how the great Adolphe Nourrit, who had premiered the role, and whose singing Rossini actually preferred, attempted to remake his voice to compete with Duprez. He ended up committing suicide at age thirty-seven.

Potter is a tenor himself. He sang for years with the innovative Hilliard Ensemble and recently recorded Dowland with saxophone accompaniment. He traces the development of the tenor voice from its earliest documented origins in twelfth century church music, through the increasingly virtuosic demands on tenors due to the influence of the castrati, with their lightness and agility. Since the demise of the castrati, Duprez’s breakthrough, and the development of recordings, operatic tenors have been expected to fill huge opera houses with ringing high notes.

Inevitably most of Potter’s focus is on opera singers, as he highlights the contributions of significant singers of the past and present. including Canadians Léopold Simoneau, Jon Vickers, Ermanno Mauro and Ben Heppner.

He looks at such recent phenomena as ‘stadium tenors’, writing that “if you start your career in stadiums, the chances of a retreat into an actual opera theatre are rather remote, as Mario Lanza found (ultimately to his cost).” Even though he appreciates each member of the Three Tenors individually, as an ensemble, he writes, they “reinforced the tendency for the public to be offered a very limited musical diet, anthologized in the form of a ‘greatest hits’ collection, with none of the vagaries of operatic plots or the contortions of recitative to contend with.” On the other hand, early music tenors occupy “one of the few areas in which creative singers can have the expectation of a career outside the realm of opera,” in spite of what he refers to in an endnote to a Handel aria as “the bland offerings of the twenty-first century early music movement.”

Book Shelf July/August 2009

Menahem Pressler: Artistry in Piano Teaching

by William Brown

Indiana University Press

326 pages, photos; $24.95 US

Menachem Pressler is best known for his performances and recordings with the legendary Beaux Arts Trio, which just disbanded after fifty years. He has also maintained an active solo career. But in this biography William Brown shows him to be as great a teacher as he is pianist. Brown studied with Pressler at his long-time base at Indiana University. He uses interviews with former students, associates, family members, and Pressler himself, along with transcripts of lecture-demonstrations and Pressler's detailed commentaries on specific works, to create a vivid portrait of Pressler as a teacher.

By offering different perspectives on Pressler's teaching style, Brown offers a treasure-trove of musical insights. Above all, what comes through in these pages is the passion and commitment with which Pressler shares what really matters to him. "It's good, but it's not magic," he says after hearing a student play. "Play as if your life depends upon it," he tells a student. To another he explains that the function of music is "to make life worth living".

In a chapter called ‘Pressler's Humor', a former student recalls, "He was horrified with the whole notion of vacations. I'd come back, and I'd have a cold, and he'd say, ‘You see, you took a vacation, and now you're sick.' So, I couldn't win. It was impossible." Clearly he is not just trying to be funny. He is passing on

what it means to him to devote one's life to music.

The key to his interpretive approach is revealed when he tells a student, "If the choice is to take the excitement of the performance or the clean note, take the excitement. If you hit it clean, how great, yes?" He then relates that directly to his own playing, "That's terrible advice from a piano teacher, but it's the advice I'm giving myself when I perform. That's how I live my life in performance."

Menahem Pressler is in Toronto with Toronto Summer Music from July 20 until July 25, coaching piano and chamber ensembles. On July 23 he gives a concert with Pressler & Friends at 8:00 in the MacMillan Theatre.

Pressler performs with the Emerson String Quartet on October 2009 8:00 in Koerner Hall.

Never Sang for Hitler: The Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann

by Michael Kater

Cambridge University Press

411 pages, photos; $36.95

Michael Kater takes a different approach to his subject than Brown in this biography of the German singer Lotte Lehmann,. He acknowledges her ‘natural genius'. He appreciates, from recordings, the sweetness and purity of her voice, and her ability to convey emotion soulfully and sincerely. He admires her forthright personality, her charisma and her ability to captivate audiences. He readily documents her many acts of generosity.

But at the same time he portrays her as opportunistic, greedy, manipulative, naïve, materialistic, jealous, and, worst of all, untruthful. "Money and enhanced career opportunities seem to have been her only motivation," he writes.

Kater, who teaches history at York University, has written extensively on 20^th German culture. Here his prime concern is to place Lehmann in the social context of her times - she lived in Germany and Austria until 1934, then in California until her death in 1976. His provocative study shines a disturbing light on the relationship between Lehmann's art and her political milieu.

During the course of his exhaustive, meticulously documented research, Kater discovered correspondence "in an obscure archive in Vienna" dealing with a meeting Lehmann had with Hermann Göring in 1934. For the rest of her life she painted herself as a fanatical anti-Nazi who bravely refused to sing for them.

But Kater reveals another story altogether. Lehmann wanted to sing for Hitler. The only reason she never did was because she couldn't work out a satisfactory deal with Göring for the Berlin State Opera, hard as she tried.

After that, almost everything she does is presented in the light of her duplicity. So she only started giving lieder recitals, which were unusual in America at the time, because she couldn't get enough opera jobs. And she only started teaching because her singing career was washed up.

Kater creates a fascinating portrait of a great singer and her times. Yet his approach is controversial, especially in his determination to set the historical record straight rather than explaining Lehmann's artistry. What bothers him most is not that she wanted to sing for Hitler, but that she took advantage of what were truly horrible circumstances for so many to falsely present herself as a heroic victim of the Nazis. "It should now have been clear to Lehmann," writes Kater, "that reaching for the stars, while making a pact with the devil, had its price."

Death With Interruptions

by José Saramago

translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Harcourt

250 pages; $30.95

In this brilliant and very funny novel, the Portugese writer José Saramago imagines that death takes a holiday. But the citizens of the unnamed country where nobody is dying fail to appreciate the gift of eternal life. What's more, it's a disaster for undertakers, hospitals, life insurance companies, politicians and the military. Church officials worry whether people will start rejecting the resurrection and afterlife, and stop believing in god, if no-one ever dies.

After seven months, death - who is a woman here -goes back to work. This time she mails out warnings to those about to die, to give them time to prepare. But to her surprise this is appreciated even less than her holiday.

When one of death's violet-coloured warning letters is repeatedly returned to her, she visits the man who keeps failing to receive the letter and die. He turns out to be a middle-aged cellist who plays first chair in the national symphony. Death sees the score of Bach's sixth cello suite in d major - Saramago sticks to the lower case - open on a chair. "She didn't need to be able to read music to know that it had been written, like beethoven's ninth symphony, in the key of joy, of unity between men, of friendship and of love," writes Saramago. "Then something extraordinary happened, something unimaginable, death fell to her knees."

Death takes the form of an attractive young woman and goes to the concert where the cellist is performing a solo passage. "The cellist starts to play his solo as if he had been born for that alone," writes Saramago. "He plays as if he were bidding farewell to the world, as if he were at last saying everything that he had always kept unsaid, the truncated dreams, the frustrated yearnings, in short, life." The audience cheers, and death falls in love.

This satire on the worlds of politics, business and religion reveals Saramago's inventive imagination, as well as his cynical world-view. Yet there is profound humanity in his voice, a fact that was not unnoticed when he won the Nobel Prize in 1998. If death can be seduced by music, as happens here, then music - and, presumably, all art - holds the key to life after death.

Book Shelf: May 09

Secret Agent: The Selected Journals and Letters of Harry Somers

edited by William Scoular

352 pages, photos; $30.00

available from the Canadian Music Centre

Three weeks before Harry Somers died, he wrote in his journal, "I list my occupation as secret agent. Whenever I've been caught & it's been frequently, I confess to anything & everything. ‘Yes, yes,' I confess, escaping all torture. ‘You are a traditional conservative composer?' ‘YES.' ‘You are an eclectic?' ‘Oh YES.' ‘You have been at times an avant garde composer?' ‘I'll sign the paper!' ‘You're old hat?!' ‘Yes. Yes. A beat up old hat.'"

No-one except Somers himself could have come up with this. That's what makes these journals and letters so remarkable. Somers always stood out for his elegance, wit, charm, forthrightness and passionate dedication. We now have a whole new dimension on him - his thoughts, his feelings, his worries, and even what he read and listened to.

Somers' wife Barbara Chilcott and the editor William Scoular have done a Herculean job of assembling and editing the diaries and letters, written on scraps of paper over a period of 30 years. Their importance makes it all the more desirable that the next step be taken to have them fully annotated and indexed.

Certain situations need explaining, such as what happened in 1965 that would provoke Somers to curse ‘the commonwealth', ‘the Queen', ‘Ozawa', ‘Walter Hamburger' (sic), ‘Bright's champagne', ‘the government' and ‘Irving Glick', all in one breath? Important figures like E. Robert Schmitz need to be identified. Names like ‘gord rainor', ‘Milhoud', and ‘Crumm', misspelled by Somers - whether inadvertently or on purpose - should have their proper spelling noted. What annotations there are, given in square brackets in the text, are not always accurate. The published journal reads, "I remember Krenek [president of the USSR's composers' union] referring to Copland as superficial." But here Somers is surely referring to the Austrian composer Ernst Krenek, not the Soviet composer Tikhon Khrennikov, who was Somers' dinner companion when he visited the USSR in 1976.

Somers' speculations about writing an autobiography come up constantly in these pages. "There are many sides of many things I've not spoken of," he wrote in 1995. Fortunately he left this candid, fascinating journal, and along with his letters, it makes an essential contribution to the cultural life of this country. A terrific collection of photos and a DVD containing clips of TV and documentary interviews give readers a sense of his physical presence.

The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years

by Simon Morrison

Oxford University Press

504 pages, photos; $32.95

If the secret agent who figures in Harry Somers' journal was a romanticized fantasy, the secret agents in Prokofiev's life were real, nasty, and dangerous - from the Russian émigré cellist in Hollywood who made sure Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union, to the malicious head of the Union of Soviet Composers, Tikhon Khrennikov, who Somers had found to be "terribly kind" when he met him in Moscow.

This brilliant chronicle of Prokofiev's final years focuses on why he returned to what was now the Soviet Union, and how that irrevocable move affected his life and music. "He thought to influence Soviet cultural policy," writes Morrison, "but instead it influenced him."

Morrison explores how Prokofiev's ambition, vanity, and naiveté led him to his fateful decision. It's clear from his diaries (now being published in English) that he missed his homeland. But he was lured by offers of performances and money. Morrison considers the influence of his fervent Christian Science spiritualism, which likely prevented him from seeing the repression, incarcerations and murders of artists that were occurring regularly in the Soviet Union under Stalin.Yet he shows that Prokofiev in fact had some sense of the personal and artistic freedom he would be sacrificing. In any case, as soon as he had moved his wife Lina and their two sons from Paris to Moscow, he could only travel abroad with Lina if he left his two sons behind. By 1938, neither he nor Lina was allowed to leave at all.

But as difficult as things gradually became for Prokofiev, they were far worse for Lina, who was not even Russian. First, Prokofiev left her for a young admirer, and then, when she tried to leave the USSR, she ended up spending years in Soviet camps on fabricated charges of treason.

Morrison is a Canadian scholar now teaching at Princeton. He has made full use of his unprecedented access to unpublished documents and scores now in the Russian State Archives. Morrison's meticulous endnotes and index makes this detailed biography accessible, and his elegant writing style makes it thoroughly engrossing to read.

Leonard Bernstein: American Original

edited by Burton Bernstein and Barbara B. Haws

HarperCollins

240 pages, photos; $31.95

For years, Leonard Bernstein's father Sam pressured his musically precocious eldest son to go into the family beauty-supplies business. Later he defended himself by saying, "How could I know he would grow up to be a Leonard Bernstein?" As his father had finally figured out, Leonard Bernstein was an original. But no-one could live up to the title of this book and be a "modern renaissance man" who "transformed music and the world" - not even this charismatic conductor, composer, writer and educator. Fortunately the ten essays in this book are less starry-eyed and more incisive than the title would suggest. Together, they offer a well-balanced portrait of a complex figure.

There's an eloquent memoir by music critic Alan Rich, who admits to often being hard on Bernstein, mostly for ignoring contemporary music. Historian Paul Boyer discusses how Bernstein added a political dimension to his role as conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Like Prokofiev, he believed that art not only reflects but influences social reality. His outspoken support for issues such as civil liberties, environmental protection and world peace was considered so audacious at the time that he ended up with an FBI file almost 700 pages long.

Unlike the Soviet composer, he did achieve some influence. But, as his younger brother Burton Bernstein writes in one of his memorable chapter-by-chapter commentaries, he paid a price - in the press at least - for what his brother considers his naiveté. American composer John Adams offers the perspective of a young man first discovering Bernstein. "I thought I'd found the model for what the future of classical music in America would be," he writes.

The splendid photos and documents enrich the texts. My favorite photo, from 1970, shows Bernstein in leisure clothes coaching his baseball team, the Philharmonic Penguins. Beside him, watching intently in his baseball uniform and cap, is his protégé Seiji Ozawa, who would have just finished his stint as conductor of the Toronto Symphony.

The Toronto Symphony performs two works by Bernstein, Three Dance Episodes from On the Town, and Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, on May 13 at 8:00 and May 14 at 2:00.

Bernstein's West Side Story is on stage at the Stratford Festival from June 5 until October 31.

Pamela Margles’ BookShelf

Sonic Mosaics: Conversations

with Composers

by Paul Steenhuisen

University of Alberta Press

344 pages, photos; $34.95

Canadian composer and writer Paul Steenhuisen surveys contemporary Canadian music – and contemporary music in general - by interviewing twenty-six of Canada’s most interesting compos-ers, along with six European and American composers like Pierre Boulez and George Crumb.

Steenhuisen shows an understanding of the work of everyone he interviews, no matter what their musical style. This especially pays off with an experimental composer like John Oswald, whose technique of plunderphonics challenges traditional approaches to composition. Things get lively when he asks Oswald whether his pieces have an expiry date. Steenhuisen’s questions are thought-provoking, and his thorough preparation allows him to follow wherever the subject takes him. A surprising answer can turn things in an entirely different direction.

One of the most engaging aspects of this book is the way Steenhuisen approaches the issues involved in being a Canadian composer, and whether Canadian music has “a certain sound, a unique aesthetic”. John Weinzweig can’t identify what the sound is, but insists that it exists. John Beckwith says, “There is a Canadian repertoire and it goes back further than most people are aware.” But later he says, “Your music doesn’t get played very much if you’re Canadian.” Gary Kulesha goes even further, saying, “At this moment there is no Canadian composer who has a substantial international presence.” Barbara Croall, whose mother is Aboriginal, adds a more positive dimension when she says that her identity as a Canadian lies in the intuitiveness of her creative process.

Almost all the interviews that make up this collection were originally published in WholeNote Magazine. Most of them relate to a particular performance or recording. In some cases, this means that the questions focus so narrowly on a single work that you don’t get a well-rounded picture of the composer’s musical personality, especially with someone as multi-faceted as R. Murray Schafer.

Steenhuisen makes no claims to have interviewed every significant Canadian composer, and, inevitably, a number are absent. But of the thirty-two composers interviewed, just five are women. In a country where women composers have always played a major role, this is a disproportionately small representation. But many things in this important book have been particularly well-considered, from the design, the photos and the cover art, to the discography, annotations, and index (which even has an entry for playfulness).

Moving to Higher Ground

by Wynton Marsalis

Random House

202 pages, photos; $30.00

Wynton Marsalis covered the same territory in previous books. But now he is not just describing the ways jazz can touch your soul and stir up your sense of beauty. What he’s saying is that jazz can teach concrete life lessons - to listeners and players alike. It teaches you to recognize your strengths and weaknesses, develop your own unique sound, and learn to work things out with other people. His explanations of what jazz is are as good an I’ve ever read, and his comments on musicians he has known, ‘Lessons from the Masters’, are fascinating. Mostly he is admiring, but, to illustrate his ‘Be true to your dreams, don’t compromise’ mantra, he comes down hard on Miles Davis for selling out towards the end of his career.

Marsalis, a well-known jazz and classical trumpeter, composer, and director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, offers an insider’s perspective, having known and played with almost all the great players of his time. He understands what makes them great. Sometimes he goes too far, writing that “jazz musicians get closer to expressing the actual diversity in the ways of love than any musicians before them.” But we get the idea nonetheless.

Terrific anecdotes illustrate his points. There’s the time, as an overeager kid, he first played for Harry “Sweets” Edison, and Edison said “Man, you just played more notes than I played in my entire career.”

Marsalis is fortunate in his co-author Geoffrey Ward.“One touch of his hand on the piano and the moon entered the room” is a lovely evocation of Ellington’s piano playing. A pithy comment about Dizzy Gillespie, “His playing showcases the importance of intelligence”, says much about this eloquent book as well.

52_3_bookshelf The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece

by Eric Siblin

House of Anansi Press

328 pages; $29.95

An encounter with Bach’s solo Cello Suites at a concert in Toronto, a chance conversation in a Montreal café with an elderly cellist who turns out to be a “living breathing link with the past”, the opportunity to study the oldest existing score of the Suites in a Brussels library - all this spurs Eric Siblin to uncover the story behind the Suites.

Siblin never found Bach’s original score. But he did find a copy of the same edition of the Suites that Pablo Casals had discovered in 1890, which had lead the young cellist to perform them together for the first time in their history. “I had stumbled into my own prelude,” writes Siblin.

The former Montreal pop music critic is curious, resourceful and passionate. Even though this is a tale of personal discovery, Siblin knows when to get out of the way. So we get biographies of Bach, and Casals, as well as the performance history of the Suites.

Siblin is a skillful writer. His passion for the music and instinctive grasp of the issues comes through. He has done extensive research, although he gets a few minor things wrong. For example, the Berkeley Symphony, which Kent Nagano conducted for almost thirty years, is hardly an “amateur hippied-out” orchestra. The instrument that Dmitry Badiarov promotes for the sixth suite is the violoncello da spalla, which is held on the shoulder, not the violoncello piccolo, which is in fact held like a cello. He offers a reliable bibliography to back up his research. But, frustratingly, his endnotes are hidden at the back, with nothing in the text to indicate what they are annotating.

Siblin is right that the Cello Suites provide a perfect entrée into the sound world of Bach. He provides a delightful and illuminating journey into that world.