Until the thirteen year old Pablo Casals discovered the sheet music for Bach's suites for unaccompanied cello in a Barcelona music shop in the late 1880s, these now-essential pieces of the cellist's repertoire were almost completely unknown (even the boy's teacher had never heard of them). Casals studied these works for his own satisfaction a dozen years before performing them in public, and it was not until the years immediately preceding the Second World War that he recorded them on 78rpm discs (most movements on first takes, the rest on seconds-- such was his mastery both of technique and of Bach's challenging scores).

As Casals was the first to record this music, his standard is the mark to which cellists have long aspired. What has always set Casals' versions apart is that he remembers that these are suites of dance music, that they were composed at a time when the terms allemande, sarabande, bourree, and gavotte still meant music to which measures were tread in a ballroom or on a stage. There is an essential lightness to these renderings, not the ersatz bouyancy achieved (as, regrettably, in many an "authentic" performance of baroque music) by too-rapid tempi, but an unforced fleetness by way of a seemingly effortless, natural phrasing, almost as sure as the rise and fall of breath. The original spirit of the dance remains itact, an element sorely missed in many recordings of these suites currently available, which range in effect from stringent, almost pedantic, to overtly romantic, even lugubrious. Pierre Fournier's recording from the 1960s, currently in the DGG catalogue, is a lovely exception, more akin to Casals' standard than any other.

The only possible drawback here is the recorded sound. The 78rpm disc, the acme of recording technology in the 1930s, is well-known for its scratches, pops, crackles, wobbles and overall hiss, inevitable traces of the surface-contact method then used to capture music. The engineers at EMI have done an astonishing job here in filtering out and/or eliminating altogether the undesirable byproducts of pre-vinyl manufacture, so that Casals' performances come across cleanly and clearly, vividly, in remarkable detail. Digital-age sound quality this cannot pretend to, but it's more than sufficient to take the listener up into the genius of Bach as rediscovered in the mastery of Casals, and sufficient enough to make this a first recommendation for the collector.

On a more personal note: this reviewer remembers as if it had been yesterday the first time he heard these performances, especially the Prelude to the Third Suite. Decades later, in making his will, he specified that third Prelude to be played at his memorial service-- that majestic a piece of music, that stirring-to-depth, that heartbreaking and that consoling.