Re-recording Bach

Performers

Jean-Guihen Queyras → Violoncello and moderation
Students of the College of Music Freiburg: Matthias Bär, Jia-Hua Chu, Charlotte Desch, Yuna Dierstein, Szymon Strusinski, Brendan Aleksander Tarm, Joscha Wagner, Till Schuler

Program

Johann Sebastian Bach → Suite No. 1 in G major BWV 1007
Workshop: The absent leading actor; what role does the bass voice play in a suite "senza basso"
Johann Sebastian Bach → Suite No. 2 in D minor BWV 1008
Workshop: Bach-Boulez, the fascination of abstraction
Pierre Boulez → Messagesquisse for 7 cellos
Johann Sebastian Bach → Suite No. 5 in C minor BWV 1011

A concert atelier with Bach's cello suites

Jean-Guihen Queyras presents his new interpretation of the famous works for solo cello

In 2017, Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker developed the piece "Mitten wir im Leben sind/Bach6Cellosuiten" together with Jean-Guihen Queyras and her company "Rosas". Jean-Guihen Queyras, Professor of Cello at the College of Music Freiburg, played Johann Sebastian Bach's six cello suites on stage, with five dancers dancing to his interpretation. After its world premiere at the Ruhrtriennale 2017, the dance piece was performed over 100 times.

The cello suites were already an integral part of Queyras' repertoire, as he had released them on CD in 2007. However, the experience of playing them live for dancers was a completely different one. The suites became chamber music, he gave impulses to the dancers and received impulses from them, there was a physical energy on stage that he had to deal with on the cello.

The choreography works strongly and physically with gravity. A dancer puts all his weight into a step, gives a powerful impulse with his foot, lifts off and floats. In the interaction with this work, Jean-Guihen Queyras' playing became different: the bass line is the gravity on which the music is based, it can float freely and lightly between the bass notes. The result is an interpretative freedom that fully corresponds to Bach's music.

In the winter semester of 2023/2024, Jean-Guihen Queyras took time to incorporate these experiences into a new recording of the cello suites, which has been released under the title "Complete Cello Suites - the 2023 Sessions".

He is now presenting his new interpretation musically and theoretically at the College of Music Freiburg in a concert studio entitled "Re-recording Bach".
Bach's suites have been published under the title "6 Suites a Violoncello Solo senza Basso". Although the entire music is based on the fundamentals of the basso continuo, the addition of "senza Basso" in the title indicates that the bass notes are not always included in the musical texture of the suites. In the Sarabande of the fifth suite in particular, it is left to the listener's musical imagination in many places to complete the bass part. Queyras shows how he constructed his interpretation based on these notes despite the missing bass notes by playing a version of the second suite for two cellos: One cello plays the original, the second cello completes the bass part.

A second addition to the program is Pierre Boulez' "Messagesquisse pour Violoncelle principal et 6 Violoncelles", which Jean-Guihen Queyras will perform together with students from his class under the direction of Jacob Gröper. In this piece, Queyras demonstrates a different aspect of the cello suites: Bach's work with abstraction. Even if the pieces appear to us today as emotionally richly illustrated musical miniatures, many of them are very formalistic and the work of a theoretically thinking mind. Just as Pierre Boulez was able to create a serial piece as a work of art that develops an emotional quality from a theoretical idea.