Fanfare 2.review

Five stars: Enthusiastically and unreservedly recommended.

BACH Cello Suites 1-6. • Henrik Dam Thomsen (vc) • OUR 8.226921

When I first got this for review I worried about having to deal with the Bach cello suites played by a musician I’d never heard of before. “Oh, no,” I thought. “He’s going to turn out to be some obsessed ‘historically informed performance’ freak playing with no vibrato on gut strings that sounded like he didn’t realize you were supposed to take them out of the cat first.” Then I looked up Henrik Dam Thomsen online and found his website, which identified him as the “solo cellist” of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra since 2000. While I suspect that really should be “principal cellist,” it still means he’s played music from all eras and therefore has a wide range of musical experiences instead of just concentrating on the Baroque.
What comes through most strongly in Henrik Dam Thomsen’s quotes from the CD booklet is his reverence for this music. “I have just turned 50,” he said, “and for 40 of those years I have studied the suites. So a long musical journey underlies the way in which I play them today. … I have played Bach at numerous concerts over the years, and at the same time the suites have been my daily practicing therapy.” Though he’d been playing the Bach suites in public at least since 2006 – when he gave a marathon recital in Tokyo consisting of some of the Bach suites, Zoltán Kodály’s solo cello suite and the Dvořák cello concerto with the New Japan Philharmonic – the current project began with Thomsen privately practicing the suites during the COVID-19 lockdown.
This reminded me of the anecdote of how 13-year-old Pablo Casals discovered an old copy of the six Bach cello suites in a second-hand store in 1890. The legend is that it wasn’t until 1901, over a decade later, that Casals felt he knew the pieces well enough to dare to play them in public. And it wasn’t until the 1930’s that he felt ready to record them.
This reverential attitude is strongly apparent in Thomsen’s performances, too. He says in the booklet notes that he respects the period-instrument performers who play the Bach suites on gut-stringed Baroque cellos or violas da gamba, “but I feel that it is important for me to remain true to my own instrument.” Thomsen notes that the cello he uses was made by Francesco Ruggieri in 1680, five years before Bach was born. But he uses modern strings and an ordinary bow instead of that preposterous contraption, the so-called “Bach bow,” based on a wildly inaccurate painting from Bach’s time that makes these already challenging pieces even harder. Thomsen also uses the modern A=442 Hz standard tuning and plays a normal four-string cello even for the sixth suite, which Bach wrote for a five-stringed instrument. Though this makes the piece more difficult, Thomsen explains, “I feel that this ensures the best homogeneity for the suites as a whole.”
The highest compliment I can pay to Thomsen’s renditions of the Bach cello suites is that he makes them sound easy, much the way Fred Astaire made it look like anybody could do his dances even though almost nobody else could. As well as Yo-Yo Ma plays these suites, there’s always an element of showing off in his performances – especially his videos. “Look at how hard I’m working to play this,” Ma seems to be calling out to his audiences. Though this is an audio-only recording, I suspect the consummate ease with which Thomsen plays this music would come through if we had a video as well.
Thomsen made the recording in the Garnisons Kirke in Copenhagen in February 2024. He and his co-producer, Mikkel Nymand, achieved a beautiful sound quality. In some of the Pristine Classical reissues of old string quartet and other chamber-music recordings, I’ve noticed that there’s a sense that the whole body of the instrument is producing the sound. Modern recordings all too often pick off the string vibrations and don’t give us a sense of the full body. This one does. While I could have wished for a bit more sprightliness and verve in the faster dance movements, that’s my only quibble and it doesn’t take away from the full majesty of these performances. Enthusiastically and unreservedly recommended. Mark Gabrish Conlan

Five stars: Enthusiastically and unreservedly recommended.