There is a recording of Pablo Casals playing Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G Major that sounds like it was captured inside a wooden box buried in the earth — and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
This 1998 compilation does something genuinely strange and valuable: it places three different interpreters of Bach’s Cello Suites in conversation across time, letting you hear how a single line of music can be inhabited so differently by three different human beings. Casals recorded his versions between 1936 and 1939 in London, working with EMI at Abbey Road before the war changed everything. Segovia — the great Andalusian guitarist — brought his own transcriptions to the project, translating the cello’s logic onto gut strings and spruce. Stern offers yet another angle, recorded decades later, the bow arm of a man who’d spent a lifetime inside concert halls.
The Casals Sessions
Casals recorded these suites when he was already sixty, which is almost impossible to comprehend when you hear the physical authority in the playing. Fred Gaisberg oversaw those sessions — the same man who recorded Caruso, who understood that the microphone had to earn the music’s trust. The acoustic on the Casals tracks is close, immediate, almost uncomfortably so. You hear breath. You hear the wood of the cello responding to changes in bow pressure. These aren’t performances preserved in amber; they’re performances still alive in whatever medium holds them.
The mono transfer that appears on this compilation is not pristine. It was never going to be. What it is, is honest.
Three Voices, One Architecture
Bach wrote these suites without a fully worked manuscript we can point to — we have Anna Magdalena’s copy, made after the fact, with her own confusions and interpretive choices baked in. Every performer who picks these up is already doing a kind of archaeology. Segovia understood this instinctively; his approach to the Sarabandes in particular has a quality of excavation, each note placed with the deliberateness of someone who knows the object might be fragile. His guitar brings out harmonic overtones the cello sometimes obscures, which is its own revelation.
Stern’s contribution to the compilation tilts toward the lyrical. He was a great melodist — everyone said so, and it’s true — and you feel that in the way he shapes the longer phrases in the slower movements, letting lines breathe before closing them.
What the compilers understood in putting this together is that no single performance owns the Suites. Not Casals, not Ma, not anyone. These pieces are a kind of commons.
The transfer quality across the different eras is uneven, and that’s simply the reality of listening to a document like this. The Casals recordings will always carry the weight of their age. But there’s something to be said for sitting with that unevenness — for letting your ear adjust, for following the music through the static the way you’d follow someone’s voice through a bad phone connection because what they’re saying matters enough to stay on the line.
Late at night, with the room quiet, the Prelude to Suite No. 1 played by Casals sounds like the beginning of something. Or maybe the end of something. It’s never entirely clear which.