Alone with Bach in Romanesque churches
Bernhard Maurer has recorded Bach's cello suites in churches around Thun in sound and image and put the films online: Light and dark sounds in light and darker rooms.
There is hardly any other music that is so difficult to make music from. Johann Sebastian Bach's cello suites are a challenge - and quite a few have already failed. Many recordings of the suites sound brittle, without arcs, spelled out from note to note. Bernhard Maurer increases the risk by recording all six suites live. Not in the studio, but in medieval churches around Thun. "Whenever I had the opportunity to play a Bach suite in a Romanesque church, it seemed to me that this was the ideal space for this music, even if the music was composed half a millennium after the building," explains Maurer. And so no sound documents were created, but six films in light and dark church rooms, which can be viewed on the website bachsuites.ch can be accessed as a YouTube link.
There is the recording of the sixth cello suite in Blumenstein church. In front of an empty audience, Maurer plays a five-string cello piccolo, built in 2012 by Stephan Schürch after a model by Nicolò Amati. The instrument of baroque provenance does not sound as domesticated as the modern cello, but it is brighter and perhaps also more honest. Maurer not only plays with somnambulistic assurance, but also with a clear, low-vibrato tone and a pronounced sense of timbre and dynamics. The intimate setting, the solitude of the church, emphasizes the private character of the suites. Various camera angles show the virtuoso fingering of the left hand, the bow in close-up, the colorful church windows or the long shot with Maurer in the center of the church. This Bachian concentration on the essentials would have done the films good; sometimes the changes of perspective seem unnecessarily hectic and take away from the tranquillity of the music.
The third suite, captured on film in the sparse Schlosskirche Spiez, sounds darker and more familiar. Here Bernhard Maurer plays on a more common baroque cello from the school of Giovanni Battista Maggini. Once again, you can feel that Maurer has been studying the suites for decades. There are no intonation uncertainties, the tempi seem natural, no gigue, which others sometimes turn into a superficial virtuoso piece.
So: It's worth visiting the website, which also offers good background information in addition to the links. Of course, the usual advertising interruptions on YouTube are terrible - perhaps something could be done about this and the films could be linked directly on the site? These sensitive works in particular really don't need screaming commercialism.
