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Pierre Fournier Plays Bach's Cello Suites

19th of May, 2020

This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic. I was reviewing Sechs Suiten fur Violoncello Solo, a recording of Bach's solo Cello suites by Pierre Fournier. This is another work which plays pretty heavily into the culture of RateYourMusic. It refers to the writer epithalamion, and to the extent that any subculture as small as RateYourMusic can have celebrity authors, she is one. She is rather secretive, I don't know her name.




In an excellent review of Koroliov's Die Kunst der Fuge, epithalamion writes that Bach perhaps "really did, on some level, want people to experience the piece by looking at the sheet music and perceiving the notes as abstract zero-dimensional pulses operating in an infinite vacuum with only their relative positions to define the space". Koroliov's recording is so fantastic in part because he understands this aspect of Bach, and plays in order that we understand the music as a set of logical relationships between weightless disembodied points on a two dimensional plane of pitch and time. There are of course other ways to read Bach. Here, in an interpretation of the least contrapuntal of all his great works, Pierre Fournier takes the opposite approach to Koroliov. The most vitally important thing about the cello suites is not the notes, imagined in the mind of a sleeping embryonic thunderbird, but the immediate sound itself as heard by stinky humans. Fournier plays in order that we understand the physical character of the world that raised the man that wrote this music, and affirms the acoustic character of his instrument. This is the reverberating legacy of the excitation of a string.

Anything objectively real has about it the kindness of existence—only the mental and suggested is ever wrong. Stones and soil will never lie to you.

I am rather fond of IDM.