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Double Bass Bach Cello Suite No. 1 - which edition?

P

Peter Berquist

Apr 12, 2005
9
0
Savannah, GA area
www.facebook.com
#1
I am interested in tackling the Bach first cello suite.

Any suggestions on which edition to get?

I already own a cello edition (International - Fournier) for reference, and wanted to get a bass edition.

Looking at the Lemur catalog, I notice there are these editions available:

1. Sterling
2. Rabbath
3. Rohe
4. Ellison
5. Bernat

Thanks for your suggestions.
 
#3
Avoid the Sterling. The Rabbath and Ellison editions are both in the original octave and both provide fingerings (which work well for me). The main difference between these two are the bowings. Ellison's are based on the Anna Magdalena Bach manuscript, while Rabbath's are the traditional/modern bowing.
 
#4
I had the Bernat, which is widely criticized. It got the job done, but it could have been better British Airways lost it for me.
I am working out of the International music 'cello edition you mention, which I found for $6 and that is going well for me.
it is very fluid to move between an octave down and at pitch.
I tend agree with performances being at pitch - if at all, but the Prelude to #2 is beautiful in the low octave.
 
#5
I think I am the only Sterling defender on this site. I just like the lower tessitura of Suite #1 in C. Of course, you take away the open string/thumb position pedal notes when you play it in C, but I've tried it in many keys and I keep coming back to the Sterling, where I first learned the suites over 35 years ago.
 
#8
Kjetil Laukholm said:
Paul, there is nothing traditional about rabbaths edition.
I would go with a Bärenreiter to start with.
If you have the money get the actual manuscripts and make your own choices.
Click to expand...
I just bought the Bärenreiter and regardless of what annotated edition you use, this is a great resource. For instance, A. Bach's edition is probably the closest to the original, but apparently her slurs are a bit sloppy such that it is impossible to tell in the original where the slurs fall. She also made some apparent errors in the actual notes. So it's quite interesting to have the other editions.
 
#9
I have the Bernat edition and have criticized it here. The problem is that his bowings suck. There are so many instances where they make no sense, either destroying the melody/bass counterpoint or destroying the symmetry between certain melodic statements or sections of a movement.

My teacher had studied using the Sterling which he felt was superior because of the bowings. However, there were a couple of occassions when a note I was playing in Bernat didn't jive with his memory so we looked at the Sterling to see if it was a misprint, or what. After analyzing the discrepancy, we realized the note in Sterling was in fact the one that was wrong because it didn't make as much sense harmonically.
 
#10
Mr. Laszlo uses different editions for every suite. For example, if we do the 3rd suite, we use Sterling. 1st and 2nd suites we use the Barenreiter and play them up the octave at pitch. If we want to play the 4th, 5th, and 6th, we just pick one and hope it works. But we never use the Sterling for anything but the 3rd, and we just don't use the Bernat, because his changes aren't right compared to the manuscripts.
 
#13
PaulCannon said:
Traditional, as in, it's how most modern cellists have been bowing them since Pablo Casals. Lots of slurs, very lyrical. Not exactly what Bach wrote, but it is how most people still play the suite.
Click to expand...

Paul,
rabbath changes rhythms and does quite his own thing, for instance in the gigue.

I doubt you would find the students of Harrel and Fischer down the hallway from you would play it like that, not to mention your own studio.
 
#15
PaulCannon said:
Traditional, as in, it's how most modern cellists have been bowing them since Pablo Casals. Lots of slurs, very lyrical. Not exactly what Bach wrote, but it is how most people still play the suite.
Click to expand...

I suggest that you try to obtain a copy of Diran Alexanian's edition of the cello suites. Alexanian was one of Casals's most famous pupils and his edition contains both Casals's bowings and ideas along with an in depth analysis of the suites. You'll see that this approach differs greatly from Rabbath's. I only know his editions of the 1st and 2nd suites, but I find Rabbath's fingerings tend to favor certain "safety positions" such as the thumb on G in which will often cause the player to cross the string to play one or two notes to avoiding shifting and I don't really understand where his bowings are coming from. I personally find this unmusical and I don't care much to hear one note in a phrase feel cut off in a different sound world only to return a second later just to stay in a comfortable position. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the most musical fingerings I could use in the first suite and found that a good knowledge of thumb position variations and thumb below the octave harmonic helps tremendously. Bradetich has a lot of similar ideas for the first suite and in my opinion he plays the piece finer than any other bassist I've heard.

Once you start to study Casals and Bach you'll start to realize that a lot of what Casals did with the cello suites fits the music in an authentic sense. There's this current generic idea that people hear and repeat saying that Casals somehow played the cello suites in an inauthentic or more Romantic way that is not what Bach intended. While Casals took a lot of rhythmic liberties in his playing, I think that the style in which Casals plays complements each dance in the suite and in a lot of ways foreshadows our current understandings of baroque playing practice. For example, listen to the gigue from the first suite played by Casals and think about what a gigue actually is. Casals really paints the picture of the actual dance in his playing. The issue of authenticity in Casals's Bach isn't as black and white as most people make it out to be. I still think that Casals is one of the best models for bassists learning the cello suites.
 
#16
In the sense that Casals made music out of the suites, and did so beautifully, you are absolutely correct. In the sense that he made them sound as Bach would have heard them, then I have to disagree.

Plenty of research has gone into Baroque performance practice, and it's easy to hear the differences. If you want to hear the suites in a more stylistically appropriate way, I would recommend the sets by Anner Bylsma. You might still prefer the modern versions, and that's up to you, but it's worth listening to.

To paraphrase Nick Walker, is Casals' Allemande (of the 6th suite, in this case) beautiful? Absolutely. Is it really an Allemande? Nope.
 
#17
Great discussion!

I am considering investing in several editions - a couple of the bass editions and another cello edition or two. The video of Jeff Bradetich posted above is fantastic.

It seems that each player needs to do the research and make up his own mind what works best for him.

Here's a discussion of some of the cello editions:

http://www.cello.org/Newsletter/Articles/jsbach.html

A Survey of Bach Suite Editions

by Tim Janof

. . .The following are the editions, or more accurately the editors, that I chose to study:

Hugo Becker
Diran Alexanian
Pierre Fournier
Casals-Foley
Janos Starker
August Wenzinger
Dimitry Markevitch


. . .

Diran Alexanian (1929)

And then came the great Pablo Casals. What is remarkable about Casals was that, though he still lived in a time when little was yet known about Baroque music or its performance practice, his magnificent musical instincts often led him to play Bach in a manner that has now been proven to be consistent with musicological research. With Pablo Casals, the performance practice of Bach and cello technique would never be the same again.

Diran Alexanian was a protege of Casals and therefore his work reflects the influence of his teacher. Alexanian was obviously a brilliant man. His edition is the great analytical edition, which is still used throughout the world. He analyzed the function of each note and its relationship to its neighbors and to the larger phrase. In order to communicate his ideas, he developed a curious notation that takes getting used to, but ultimately gives one greater insight into the Suites.

. . .

Pierre Fournier (1972)

Pierre Fournier seems to have focused his energies into the production of a smooth and beautiful sound (what nerve!). Perhaps, because he was more of a product of the recording age, he chose this approach since it sounds "better" on recordings. To accomplish this, he tended to slur more notes together, resulting in a more even tone. . .

The advantage of Fournier's slurring is that it is easier to produce a lush and smooth sound. The disadvantage is that the overall energy level of the performance is reduced since fast notes on separate bows sound more lively. It is hard to play with grit and energy if everything is slurred.
Click to expand...
 
#18
PaulCannon said:
In the sense that Casals made music out of the suites, and did so beautifully, you are absolutely correct. In the sense that he made them sound as Bach would have heard them, then I have to disagree.

Plenty of research has gone into Baroque performance practice, and it's easy to hear the differences. If you want to hear the suites in a more stylistically appropriate way, I would recommend the sets by Anner Bylsma. You might still prefer the modern versions, and that's up to you, but it's worth listening to.

To paraphrase Nick Walker, is Casals' Allemande (of the 6th suite, in this case) beautiful? Absolutely. Is it really an Allemande? Nope.
Click to expand...

Well, like I said, it's easy to dismiss Casals entirely when you play the authenticity game, but it's not that simple a matter and regardless of all of this, as bassists we have a lot to learn from different ways of playing the music. Bylsma is my overall preferred set of recordings of the suites. He also wrote a very interesting book called Bach, the Fencing Master which talks about the first three suites. I also like Wispelwey and Beschi on period instruments. But I prefer to think about cellists themselves than lumping them into period performance and not period performance groups and enjoy a variety of different interpretations of the music.

It's easy to feel boxed in when you start to study period performance because many people think of it in terms of what you cannot do, but instead I think we should take a more positive approach to period performance studies in thinking that these are more like tools that we can use to understand the music and add depth to our performance.
 

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