| Fanfare Magazine Bach Six Solo Suites, BWV 1007 - 1012 - Richard Hartshorne (db) - Centaur CRC 2349/49/50 (3 CD's: 165:35) It's the stuff dreams are made of: A tinkerer in his workshop, after a lifetime if excessive puttering, transmutes base metal into gold. Another possible comparison, the Corpernican revolution, is less apt because Corpornicus left things as they were - after his conceptual junta, the earth still revolved around the sun. Whereas Richard Hartshorne, making the bass revolve around the music rather than the music around the bass, has created something new - a joyous, organlike version of Bach's Cello Suites that's wholly organic, never betraying effects of hothousing. As Humpty Dumpty said, there's glory for you. Centaur's three-disc set proclaims itself as a premiere recording, but another complete recording of the suites on double bass has recently become available (Mark Bernat's, on a private label - MAD) and was reviewed by David K. Nelson in Fanfare 21:4. David seemed to suggest that the difficulty of the undertaking would render just about any result phenomenal, if not entirely acceptable. Referring to the alchemist, however, we realize that there are bound to be lots of unsuccessful tinkerers but also that the alchemist, in order to succeed, must produce actual good even in a minute quantity. It was my judgement, when the editor sent me a copy of Bernat's set for review, that despite Bernat's valiant effort, he had not worked the alchemistic magic, had not confected the sacrament. Hartshorne, by contrast, has worked not just magic but a musical miracle. The story of the 28 years of labor and frustration that produced the miracle appears in the booklet's notes, in which Hartshorne describes many stages of experimentation with various combinations of fingerings, improved strings, harmonics, and scordatura for each suite. It's a facinating story, and an even more detailed account would make absorbing reading. But, finally to make a long story short, Hartshorne managed, through sheer Yankee ingenuity, to play the suites in the original keys and to preserve not only double, triple, and quadruple stops that traditional tunings render impossible but even resonant pedals based on the cello's open strings. There is another story, though, that Hartshorne was perhaps too modest to relate - the spiritual one. His performances glow with an inner light that was obviously kindled and fostered through the years of application to technical details. The course of that spiritual journey can be inferred by the reader, though, from Hartshorne's remarks about the technical solutions. Just when he would become satisfied with a transposed suite (like the sixth, originally written for a five-stringed instrument), some personal demon would drive him to find means to make the suite sound in the original key. The resulting performances are consistently authoratative and build to unanticipated epiphanies, as in the popular Gigue of the Third Sonata or the opening of the Fifth (although the revelations are by no means confined to the key of C). Only very occasionally does a note betray some difficulty of the undertaking: but in movement after movement, Hartshorne proves himself more than a technical trickster - a profound expositer, in fact, of Bach's sacred texts. Hartshorne gets his elephants to dance. And besides his warm tone and a variety of expressive devices as impressive as his technical ones, he displays a command of all the nuances of bowing. But this is no circus act. Nor is it just a courageous attempt: it's the kind of success that only rarely crowns a lifetime of effort. Recommend with reverential urgency. Robert Maxham |
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