Johann Sebastian Bach. Suites and echoes

The French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras’s programme of Bach’s cello suites and echoes is like a shimmering vibration shooting through the centuries, ages, borders of cultural environments and beauty standards.
Queyras’s musical horizons feel like endless journeys both in his performances with world-renowned orchestras and conductors, and diving into the depths of solo and chamber music.
‘I’ve always wanted to have a very multi-faceted repertoire. My character wouldn’t allow me to keep doing the same thing. I couldn’t be a Romanticism cellist just playing some beautiful phrases. I couldn’t believe them anymore because the cello can embody so many different worlds” says Queyras.
Six years of Bach’s life spent composing his cello suites in Köthen, six extended dance suites to serve as the truest proof of a cellists master skill and six modern composers in a unique chamber music event where the worldview of Bach’s age-old suites will be illuminated through modern composers’ miniatures, commissioned by Jean-Guihen Queyras. The beautiful always underlines the ugly, and the shallow – the deep; opposites inevitably attract and overflow, letting us catch the different facets of each of them.

 

Programme

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello suites
Compositions by Gilbert Amy, Ivan Fedele, Jonathan Harvey, György Kurtág, Misato Mochizuki, Ichiro Nodaira

Participants

Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello