PHILIP HIGHAM BACH SUITES FOR SOLO CELLO
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750)
SUITES FOR SOLO CELLO
PHILIP HIGHAM
Philip Higham and Delphian Records Ltd gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the following for sponsoring the individual suites:
Suite No. 1: Nigel O’Mara & In Vino Veritas Ltd
Suite No. 2: The Hope Scott Trust
Suite No. 3: Noël & Caroline Annesley
Suite No. 4: Harriet’s Trust
Suite No. 5: Ed Cohen & Victoria Shaw
Suite No. 6: John Treadway/Woodbridge Chamber Concerts
Recorded on 2-4 August 2014, 19-21 November 2014 and 2 February 2015
in the church of St John the Evangelist, Upper Norwood by kind permission of the
Revd John Pritchard, priest-in-charge
Producer: Philip Higham
Engineer: Paul Baxter
24-bit digital editing: Adam Binks
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Design: John Christ Booklet editor: Henry Howard
Cover photography © Kaupo Kikkas Session photography © Simon Wall/ TallWall Media Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk
Cello (suites 1-5) by Carlo Giuseppe Testore, 1697; 5-string cello (suite 6) by Kai-Thomas Roth, 2013 (after P. Rombouts); A = 435 Hz
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Kate Molleson: Why record the Bach Cello Suites, and why record them now?
Philip Higham: I have always been very aware that I have an evolving relationship with these pieces. It’s exciting. I’ve worked on them repeatedly throughout my studies, at school and at conservatoire, and have been performing them extensively over the past three or four years. In fact can I still remember my very first cello teacher giving me the Menuets of the First Suite, music that someone of about Grade 5 level could probably get around. I think you have to have a lot of experience behind you in order to record them: you have to have explored, experimented, been convinced and then taken several U-turns to really get somewhere with this music! There’s no substitute for experience, both before an audience and in the practice room.
Recording the Suites was something I knew I had to do, and I wanted to do it now. I felt that if I left it too late, the more likely I might feel that it had to be in some way definitive. I wanted to capture something of how I understood these pieces at this point in my life, with full acceptance that that might grow and change in the future. In a way it feels now like there is an open road ahead of me. Yes, there’s a lot of competition, but everyone who plays and records these pieces will be aware of the weight of performance history. What I’m most
sure of is that our understanding of this music is always in flux – actually, I increasingly tend to feel that about a lot of music that I think I know well! – and I certainly don’t see the recording as fixing my interpretation for good. If it’s a good recording, the listener will hear something new each time they press ‘play’. That’s the case with my favourite recordings, anyway.
KM: Growing up, you were a talented pianist and composer as well as a cellist. Why did you ultimately gravitate towards the cello, and how does your broader musical experience impact on the way you approach the Bach Suites?
PH: The things people generally regard as the defining qualities of the cello – its warmth, soulfulness, the way it emulates the human voice – I think those really hit me around the age of 16 or 17 and I began to look for that constantly in my own playing. So perhaps, at that time, I began to find more of a voice on the cello than I could on the piano. Nowadays I don’t really play the piano any more – I am definitely out of practice! But it is certainly possible that the textural breadth of the piano filters its way into the way I play the cello, and I have an imagination, always, for the context of a melodic line; this is important in all music but never more so than in unaccompanied Bach. The Suites require a great understanding of counterpoint and therefore of voicing; perhaps my piano days help me out in that respect. I also
find myself looking at all music as if I was still a composer. I love trying to get inside Bach’s mind as a craftsman; I think it’s important to be a good detective, not just a faithful servant.
KM: You know the Suites inside out, yet during the recording you were reading from a manuscript. Why?
PH: I often consult Anna Magdalena Bach’s manuscript, and during the recording sessions I was reading off it. It’s true that I perform the Suites from memory, but the more time I spend looking at this particular manuscript, the more secrets it reveals. Sometimes looking at the notes as if for the first time can be revelatory.
Anna Magdalena must have been a very exact draughtswoman. Bach didn’t trust many people in his life but he clearly trusted her. Her manuscript is beautiful: it seems to bring out the shapes in the music. Standard printed notation makes too many straight lines and solid blocks of notes, whereas the quill is far more expressive. The way that Anna Magdalena writes her slurs can be baffling – often, people assume that she meant this or that, but those assumptions usually come from twentieth or twenty-first-century aesthetic notions. So they look at the slurs and find they don’t seem to make sense, and assume that she must have been inconsistent, even careless. I think that has a lot to do with our modern ideas of logic,
symmetry and consistency. It’s true that her manuscript is not perfect (she was human!) and sometimes it is unclear, even impossible, but we have to be careful of dismissing it outright and remember that she would presumably have copied it from Bach’s own manuscript, which has never been found.
I find it fascinating sometimes to play Anna Magdalena’s phrasing as given. She rarely gives exactly the same slurring to a repeating pattern or figuration – the very opening of the Prelude of the First Suite is a good example – and there are many bars that contain no slurs at all. Again, we can’t just assume that this means ‘continue as before’, as it might in later music. Sometimes following her slurs makes the bowing go ‘upside down’; at times one can get into a tangle and think ‘Help!’ But sometimes the result can be much more beautiful than it might have been with more conventional bowing. Besides, I should have to work: these pieces demand every ounce of what we have as cellists and musicians. My bow arm has to be very alive, responsive and able to execute and improvise unusual bowing patterns; that’s when the most interesting phrasing and pronunciation can be found.
Paying close attention to Anna Magdalena’s manuscript also uncovers some immediately striking truths, perhaps the most striking of which occurs in the Prelude from the Sixth Suite. About three quarters of the way through the
movement, there are two bars (90-91) written so clearly, to me, as to be unquestionable –except that they’re at odds with every edition made after the first printed one, the heavily adorned Paris edition of 1824, and at least a whole century of performance practice (certainly every recording I’ve heard). When the music from the opening bars returns, this time on A (the dominant), instead of D (the tonic), the exact intervals have been changed from a simple upward arpeggio to a more challenging but clearly recognisable harmonic progression: a 4-3 suspension with an additional seventh.
The D is suspended from the previous bar (last beat, first note). What seems conclusive to me is that the original mistake (an additional A) somehow muddies the exact position of the correction, which is why Anna Magdalena has written the letter ‘d’ above the note head. If you have any suspicions about the calligraphy, then a scan through the manuscript, looking at other letter ‘d’s with their very ornate curve
and flick at the top of the letter, should banish them! And in the next bar, the very last note does appear to cover the top line of the stave (G) rather than sitting above it (A). In other pre-Paris editions – including the 1726 one by
Johann Peter Kellner (a composer friend of Bach’s and copyist of much of his music) and two anonymously copied ones from later in the eighteenth century – there is unmistakably a G rather than A, which makes a seventh in the chord. However, the suspended D is only found in Anna Magdalena’s copy.
Once I heard this (at first) curious alternative and began to try it in performance, I became convinced. I found it almost impossible to return to the traditional version, in which symmetry and logic seem to prevail over contrapuntal finesse and daring. This point in the movement follows the virtuosity of the arpeggios and cascading scales and heralds the return of the main idea. At such a moment, the simpler version can sound to me rather underwhelming!
KM: Clearly you delve deeply into the wealth of scholarship and long controversies surrounding these pieces. How would you describe your relationship to the historical performance movement?
PH: Well, there’s no question that I take a lot of inspiration from it and live by some of the principles that it has brought about. That said, in some people’s eyes this recording might appear to fall between two stools. For the first five Suites I’m using a Carlo Giuseppe Testore cello, made in 1697 (which makes it older than the Suites!) which has been modernised in terms of the neck and bridge, but strung with gut and played with a modern bow. For the Sixth Suite I was fortunate to borrow a very modern (2013) five-string instrument by Kai-Thomas Roth, which actually has a more baroque setup; I played this with a lighter, more transitional bow (and also on gut). So for some it will be an unusual mix of ingredients! There might be some subtleties that a baroque bow
would reveal more clearly, but I like my bow and I can find what I want with it on the Testore. I’ve also chosen a slightly lower pitch than is standard – around A435 – because I found the cello sounded marvellous with just a little less tension to the strings.
The five-string cello was a revelation to me when I first discovered it: it is by no means just a cello with an extra string, but a different animal altogether! With the E string (a fifth above the conventional cello A) you have this amazing brilliance and clarity, almost more like a violin than a cello, but also a kind of intimacy you hear on the viola da gamba. The middle registers of the instrument (now the A and D strings) are softer, warmer, more ‘speaking’ than ‘singing’, but the bass is livelier, even a bit raw, or less rounded certainly than on most four-string cellos. When I played some of the low bass notes in the second part of the Allemande, for example, I realised I’d never before been able to play them with that
Anna Magdalena Bach MS, c.1720: Sixth Suite, Prelude, bars 88b-93
Paris edition, 1824: bars 90-92
colour, that pronunciation. And the contrast between the various keys visited in the Prelude becomes immediately more vivid, the shape of the whole movement becoming more illuminated, like a brilliant, stained-glass window. Although the sonority might take some getting used to, you can see clearly why Bach, who always knew exactly the characteristics of all the instruments he wrote for (including the five-string or ‘piccolo’ cello, which he also used in a number of cantatas), chose this kind of instrument for the Sixth Suite – not only for glorious heights afforded by the E string, but for the characteristics of all its registers.
On both these instruments, gut strings are important to me. In fact these days I’m playing as much repertoire as possible on gut, not only Bach. Gut strings were prevalent right up until the Second World War; it was only then that steel strings took over. Steel strings are designed to speak with more immediacy, more brilliance, but I find that the effect can be too black and white. Take the C major Prelude: three pages almost entirely of semiquavers. On steel it’s tempting to start slurring everything together, since too many separate bows can feel solid and pedantic (or even, conversely, too lightweight). Maybe slurring appears to solve a problem, but to me it compromises other aspects of the Prelude: its virtuosity, its feeling of perpetual motion,
like a toccata, and again the differences in register, which don’t all speak in the same way. I find the gut facilitates much more variety of separate bow strokes.
KM: You like to be closely involved in the editing process of a recording. Why is that?
PH: I always want to be part of this very creative process as well. Of course it’s hard work to listen back to yourself over and over but in the end I want something that truly represents what I was searching for during the sessions. It’s easy to choose only the ‘acceptable’ takes and ignore the ones that might have a bit more risk about them. As much as these pieces are revered, some of the music has a real outdoor, rustic feeling; it needs spirit and occasionally some dirt under the fingernails, especially in the Bourrées (Suites 3 and 4) and the wonderful second Gavotte from the Sixth Suite. In the Sarabandes, as elevated as they are, I try not to be seduced into a perfectly smooth, serene tempo and character; these pieces are based on the most sensual and overt of dances, full of passion.
KM: You recorded the Suites in a church in South London (St John’s, Upper Norwood), five minutes’ walk from where you live. Why, other than the short commute, did you choose this venue?
PH: The lofty answer is that it felt right to record the Suites in a church: the feeling of big space, the feeling of spiritual elevation, but also the feeling of it being an everyday gathering place. The simpler answer is that being in this particular acoustic enabled me to play exactly as I wanted to. I felt free in it; I didn’t have to compensate for any weakness in a particular register. It helped that I was seated on a broad wooden platform just to the side of the altar. When I tried sitting in the centre of the space I found myself irrationally attempting to project to the back of the church. Being off-centre gave me more freedom. I didn’t feel I needed to project or make a ‘symmetrical’ sound. I was simply playing for myself.
There’s endless talk about whether these pieces are sacred or secular, or both, and to what extent, et cetera. To look at it objectively, on the one hand they’re instrumental pieces based on dance forms, that have their roots in society, in courts and in the land, rather than in church; on the other hand, I think it would be simplistic to suggest that divine inspiration is to be found only in Bach’s church music. After all, religion and the Bible governed his way of life, his principles, as they did so for many. My current understanding is that with Bach the only real distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ can be in terms of the specific occasion for which the music was written. In this way the Suites are obviously secular (despite my own preference to record
them in a church!) but within the rich fabric of this music there is undoubtedly a wealth of associative meaning and imagery, just as there often is in ‘secular’ painting and architecture. Over centuries we might have grown distant from this kind of referencing within music – by particular intervals, key signatures, or rhythmic patterns that could suggest numerology, for example – but in most cases I feel this might be more for the composer himself than for listener or performer. What we hear are imaginative, perfectly formed musical structures that richly explore harmony, rhythm and counterpoint within the binary form of the dances. I hope my listeners agree that there is enough pleasure to be found from this alone!
© 2015 Kate Molleson
The Herald.
Kate Molleson is a music critic for The Guardian and
Philip Higham has been described as ‘possessing that rare combination of refined technique with subtle and expressive musicianship … [with] all the qualities of a world-class artist’ (The Strad ), and has been praised for his ‘expansive but tender playing’ (Gramophone ). It is these qualities that distinguish him as one of the most prominent young cellists from the UK.
Philip has appeared as soloist with the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Hallé Orchestra at Bridgewater Hall (broadcast by BBC Radio 3), the Royal Northern Sinfonia and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. He has given recitals at Wigmore Hall, St John’s Smith Square, Brighton Festival, the City of London Festival, Gower Festival and Lichfield Festival, and further afield in Germany and Istanbul. Philip has performed at the Phillips Collection in Washington and a concert as part of the Britten Centenary in Aldeburgh (again broadcast by BBC Radio 3). Recent appearances include the West Cork Chamber Music, Three Choirs, Branscombe and Salisbury festivals and a performance of the complete Bach Suites in Tokyo at the Musashino Cultural Foundation.
Philip’s debut recording of the Britten Solo Suites was released in 2013 by Delphian Records (DCD34125) to great critical acclaim. The disc won the accolade of Editor’s Choice in Gramophone and ‘Instrumental Choice’ in BBC Music Magazine, being lauded as ‘a 5-star performance’.
Born in Edinburgh, Philip studied at the RNCM with Emma Ferrand and Ralph Kirshbaum. Early in his career he won top prizes at major international competitions including first prize in the 2008 Bach Leipzig and 2009 Lutosławski competitions, and second prize in the 2010 Feuermann Competition. He was selected by the Young Classical Artist Trust in 2009.
Britten: Suites for Solo Cello
Philip Higham
DCD34125
Britten’s meeting with Mstislav Rostropovich in 1960 was a watershed, the great Russian cellist becoming the primary collaborator of his later years and inspiring a whole series of masterworks. Among them are these three suites for solo cello, written as a conscious homage to those of Bach (there were originally to have been six). Britten scholar Paul Kildea, author of the lucid and perceptive booklet essay, sees the first as a coda to the War Requiem, the second as a snapshot of a lifetime of musical obsessions, and the third as both reaching back to much earlier works and suffused with Russian melody. Higham brings both vigour and a deep intelligence to this remarkable music.
‘a towering achievement … This is music that has consistently brought out the best in performers and you can hardly go wrong whichever you choose. This one should be near the top of your list, though. It is very special’ — International Record Review, April 2013
‘expansive but tender playing … [Higham] apprehends the complicated and multifarious elements of a set of pieces that seek to pay homage to Bach, the enormous and far-reaching Russian tradition from which their dedicatee came, and what Britten saw as a distillation of his musical influences all at the same time. There is no doubting the plain virtuosity of these works, too, and Higham revels in the glorious sound they invite the cello to make, playing around with its warmth of colours to bring out with glorious inevitability the Bach and Shostakovich hidden therein’
— Gramophone, March 2013, EDITOR’S CHOICE
‘There’s nowhere to hide in these three solo suites – but why hide a technique as assured, a musical imagination as finely attuned to Britten’s expression, or a Tecchler cello sound as burnished and wonderfully textured as this?’
— BBC Music Magazine, May 2013, INSTRUMENTAL CHOICE
J.S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One
Peter Hill piano
DCD34126 (2 discs)
A recognised authority in twentieth-century and contemporary music, Peter Hill turns for the first time on disc to another of his lifelong preoccupations: the music of J.S. Bach. In two new 2CD sets marking his new recording relationship with Delphian, Hill brings his customary scholarly acumen and crystalline musical intelligence to bear on the two books of preludes and fugues that comprise Bach’s immortal ‘48’ –music of ‘unsurpassed inventiveness’.
‘Bach’s music tests the pianist in many ways, but one of the most telling is that it asks how much or how little the performer should exert ego. Hill gets the balance just about right in an intimate account … that nevertheless oozes authority’
— Sunday Times, June 2013
J.S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book Two
Peter Hill piano
DCD34101 (2 discs)
‘warmth, clarity and insight’
— Classical Music Magazine, March 2013, EDITOR’S CHOICE
‘exceptional readings, scholarly yet living … For all the compositional rigour, Hill makes these Preludes and Fugues sing and dance, and also brings out their unshakeable foundations of faith’
— HiFi Critic, March 2012
‘Note his use of varied pianistic colours – here muted, there radiant, sonorous then shimmering. And [he] unfolds contrapuntal lines with clarity, displaying an eloquent understanding of the music’s underlying structure’
— BBC Music Magazine, May 2012, FIVE STARS
Rachmaninov/Shostakovich: Cello Sonatas
Robert Irvine cello, Graeme McNaught piano
DCD34034
An exceptional venture into the chamber repertory: Robert Irvine, whose recent recording of cello works by Giles Swayne was widely acclaimed, now appears as protagonist in these two classic Russian sonatas.
‘Rarely can [the Rachmaninov] have been recorded in a performance of such potent and poetic intensity, intelligence and clarity as that which the Scottish cellist Robert Irvine and his responsive, vital pianist, Graeme McNaught, give here. Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata is equally well done: poised, subtle and controlled where it needs to be, but appositely pugnacious, brittle and pointed in the scherzo’ — Sunday Times, July 2008
William Sweeney: Tree o’ Licht
Robert Irvine & Erkki Lahesmaa cellos, Fali Pavri piano DCD34113
Both musically impassioned and socially engaged, William Sweeney’s music is at its most eloquent when voiced by that most human of instruments, the cello. The player navigates a stormy electronic landscape in the Borges-inspired The Poet Tells of his Fame, while Schumann lies behind the powerfully argued Sonata for Cello and Piano. The Sonata bears a joint dedication to Delphian artist Robert Irvine and to Erkki Lahesmaa – ‘keepers’, as Sweeney calls them, ‘of the cello’s inner voice’ –and Irvine is joined by his Finnish colleague here in the 2008 duo
The Tree o’ Licht, in which Gaelic psalmody is transmuted into deepest instrumental expressivity.
‘luminous … an intriguing combination of exploration and introspection’
— The Independent, August 2013
Giles Swayne: Music for cello and piano
Robert Irvine, Fali Pavri
DCD34073
Giles Swayne’s works for cello exhibit an astonishing array of moods and colours. The restless beauty of Four Lyrical Pieces and strident romanticism of the Sonata offer remarkable counterpoint to his Suite for solo cello. Canto seduces the listener with its symbiotic blend of African traditional and Western art music.
‘Superbly played … recorded with trademark spaciousness and clarity … Minimalist in some ways, quite complex in others, [Canto ] projects that positive tone and enquiring spirit which represent this composer at his considerable best’ — Gramophone, March 2008
Postcard from Nalchik: Haydn – Prokofiev – Shostakovich
Edinburgh Quartet
DCD34081
The Edinburgh Quartet, Delphian regulars for nearly a decade in 20thand 21st-century music, here delve further into chamber music’s glorious past. Prokofiev’s Second Quartet shows a Russian composer writing home from the geographical margins just as 150 years earlier Haydn had looked outwards, to the Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna of Russia and her husband the future Tsar, dedicatee of the six quartets subsequently published as the Austrian master’s Op. 33. Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet, meanwhile, demands – and receives – total expressive commitment in a work which, the composer darkly suggested to a friend, was written in his own memory.
‘Seriously fine performances – exceptional in the Shostakovich – of an attractively varied programme’
— BBC Music Magazine, Christmas 2014 issue, FIVE STARS
