(++++) KEYED UP AND KEYED IN

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring—version for piano four hands; Debussy: Six Épigraphes antiques; Bartók: Two Pictures. Nadezda Pisareva and Georgy Tchaidze, pianists. Genuin. $19.99. 

Gordon Jacob: Concerto for Chromatic Accordion, String Orchestra and Percussion; Edward McGuire: Accordion Concerto; Jonathan Dove: Northern Lights. Owen Murray, accordion; BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Sir James MacMillan. Toccata Next. $18.99. 

     Stravinsky’s two dual-pianist versions of Le Sacre du Printemps bracket the 1913 orchestral première: he created one for piano four hands in 1912 and one for two pianos in 1914. More than a century later, the piano forms of the ballet supplement rather than in any way supplant the orchestral one, which remains justifiably famous not only for its notorious first performance but also for the exceptionally skilled orchestration through which it communicates. Stravinsky himself felt the 1914 two-piano version was a better concert piece than the earlier one for four hands, but when those four hands belong to Nadezda Pisareva and Georgy Tchaidze, a strong argument can certainly be made for the earlier arrangement. In a new Genuin recording, Pisareva and Tchaidze focus on the pervasive dissonance of the work and deliver its rhythmic complexities with such intensity – to the point of actual pounding from time to time – that after a while, listeners will not miss the orchestration, so effectively do the performers advocate for it in this form. The intensity with which Pisareva and Tchaidze attack the strongly accented portions of the music requires a very strong piano – the Steinway D holds up as well and with as much resonance as always – and works best if listeners distance themselves from the notion of this as ballet music: the sheer strength of the playing and emphasis on heightened sound in the service of imagined primitivism produce a performance mostly devoid of connection to anything on stage. The final dance actually makes a racket more than an apotheosis. Le Sacre du Printemps dominates this CD on all levels, but it melds interestingly with the other two works offered by Pisareva and Tchaidze. Debussy actually played the four-hand Le Sacre du Printemps with Stravinsky, although there is no way to know the extent to which Debussy had the dramatic strength of Stravinsky’s ballet in mind when producing his own four-hand work engaging with the dim past, Six Épigraphes antiques (1914-1915). Here Pisareva and Tchaidze keep their dramatic instincts appropriately in check: Debussy’s antiquarianism is altogether milder and more distant than Stravinsky’s, differently evocative of an imagined long-gone time and Impressionistic only in a very general sense. Delicacy is the primary effect here, and tone painting is less than specific: there is nothing lusty, much less lustful, in Pan as evoked in the opening piece, where he is called “god of the summer wind,” nor is there anything sepulchral at the tombeau sans nom that follows. All six Debussy miniatures inhabit scenes quite different from those limned by Stravinsky – but the musical methods of evoking those scenes are clearly of the same time period, resulting in an apt and intriguing juxtaposition of the two composers’ works. The third piece on the disc is slightly earlier: Bartók’s Two Pieces dates to 1910. And each of the Bartók items is significantly longer than any of the Debussy pieces or any single section of Stravinsky’s ballet. There is nevertheless considerable complementarity here, thanks in large part to the two-piano transcription by Zoltán Kocsis (1952-2016). The atmospheric elements in Bartók lie somewhere between those of Stravinsky and Debussy, although some cadences in the first piece sound, from the standpoint of our much later time, reminiscent of Stravinsky (despite being written earlier). Bartók’s rhythms are less irregular than Stravinsky’s, less free-flowing than Debussy’s. And each of the Two Pieces has noteworthy elements strictly on its own terms. The rippling effects toward the end of the first, In Full Flower, provide an interesting overlay of the pianos on each other. The second, Village Dance, starts with an immediate contrast to the first through strong accents and much more substantial volume. Varying in speed throughout – and not inherently danceable at all times – this piece features strong chordal passages and a gradual accelerando in the last two minutes that builds to a forceful climax. One thing that is particularly evident from this well-thought-out musical mixture is that Pisareva and Tchaidze are both technically and emotively well-suited to each other and to the music they have chosen to play. Another thing is that these pieces by Debussy and Bartók reaffirm, if reaffirmation is necessary, just how revolutionary Stravinsky was in his creation of Le Sacre du Printemps. 

     A milder revolution is on display on a Toccata Next release featuring an instrument that, like the piano, uses a keyboard – but one that, like the organ, is more of a wind instrument than a percussive one. The instrument is the accordion – and it is in fact handled more-or-less like a chamber organ by Gordon Jacob (1895-1984) in his Concerto for Chromatic Accordion, which dates to 1972. Accordions were not suitable for classical-style compositions until the free-base keyboard – featuring a left-hand manual on which all buttons play individual, single notes – emerged in the 1950s. Even after that development, composers were not especially quick to take advantage of the accordion as a concerto element. But Jacob, who had an appetite for exploring the capabilities of individual instruments, created a well-balanced four-movement work that sets off the accordion’s sound well by juxtaposing it with timpani, glockenspiel, xylophone and tambourine as well as strings – and gives the accordionist an unaccompanied third-movement Largo of modest emotional content that is succeeded by a finale with the sort of playfulness that was a characteristic of much of Jacob’s work. Owen Murray plays the concerto with understanding and just the right amount of lilt, and the accompaniment by the BBC Concert Orchestra under Sir James MacMillan is well-matched to the solo material. The other two works on the disc, both composed specifically for Murray, take advantage of his expressive skills but are not, on the whole, as engaging as Jacob’s concerto. The 1999 Accordion Concerto by Edward McGuire (born 1948) tries a bit too hard to assert its seriousness, from its strongly accented opening to the accordion cadenzas in the second and third, final movement. The harmonic landscape is dissonant, the rhythmic one quite varied, but the piece as a whole seems to make somewhat too great an effort to pull the accordion into the panoply of solo instruments: it is a work of advocacy rather than one whose use of the accordion seems organic to it. Northern Lights (2019) by Jonathan Dove (born 1959), in form a concerto for accordion and chamber orchestra, is more unconventionally structured and more engaging to hear. The first two of its three movements are both labeled Very spacious, and the second immediately follows the first, so the effect is of a very extended contemplation of the titular phenomenon, with multiple sections suggesting vastness in different ways and through different instruments – the accordion prominent among them. This leads to a finale marked Musing that, despite its title, is not so much thoughtful as it is celebratory, often dancelike, and interestingly orchestrated, with a prominent, recurring glockenspiel. The movement incorporates material from Farewell to Stromness by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016) and is intended as a tribute to him. But knowledge of the provenance of the music is not necessary for appreciation of the well-thought-through way in which Dove incorporates the solo instrument into a movement that gives the accordion plenty of virtuoso opportunities without preventing other instruments from asserting themselves effectively into the atmosphere. Murray and MacMillan present all the music on this disc with as much skill and engagement as any listener could wish for, creating, all in all, an effective argument for inclusion of the accordion – in its current form – among instruments that are quite worthy of having the spotlight of concertos shine upon them.

(++++) CONNECTIONS

Dvořák: Piano Trio No. 3; Josef Suk: Piano Trio; Elegy in D-flat; Rudolf Friml: Piano Trio “Rural Life in Bohemia.” Hermitage Piano Trio (Misha Keylin, violin; Sergey Antonov, cello; Ilya Kazantsev, piano). Reference Recordings. $24.98 (SACD). 

Brahms: Clarinet Quintet; Clarinet Trio; Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2 for Clarinet or Viola and Piano. Rúnar Óskarsson, clarinet; Helga Bryndís Magnúsdóttir, piano; Sigurđur Bjarki Gunnarsson, cello; Siggi String Quartet (Una Sveinbjarnardóttir and Helga Þóra Björgvinsdóttir, violins; Þórunn Ósk Marinósdóttir, viola; Sigurđur Bjarki Gunnarsson, cello). Sono Luminus. $16.99 (2 CDs). 

     Although not as well-known as his fourth and final trio for piano, violin and cello (the “Dumky”), Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 3 is a substantial work both musically and emotionally – and the linchpin of an interestingly conceived Reference Recordings release featuring the Hermitage Piano Trio. Dvořák’s work is of significant length – more than 40 minutes – and darkly dramatic almost throughout. It is in F minor – all Dvořák’s piano trios except No. 1 are in minor keys – and permeated both by emotion and by dance forms modified to accommodate the changing moods of the four movements. The trio contrasts interestingly with the Scherzo Capriccioso, written later in the same year (1883), as if the pervasive darkness of the chamber work is balanced, at least to an extent, by the ebullience of the orchestral one. The Hermitage Piano Trio plumbs Dvořák’s music elegantly and with suitable intensity, but without overdoing the work’s emotionalism to the point of sentimentality. By the time the final movement reaches its resilient if scarcely bright conclusion, the players have managed thoroughly to explore its emotional foundations to allow its full impact to come forth. The Dvořák is by far the most substantial work on this recording, but the other pieces on this very fine-sounding SACD compare and contrast well with it. Sequentially, it is followed on the disc by the Elegy in D-flat by Dvořák’s son-in-law, Josef Suk (1874-1935). This work was originally written for a stage play and was interestingly scored for violin, cello, string quartet, harmonium and harp before Suk arranged it as heard here. Dating to 1902, this Elegy is suitably gloomy but pervaded by thematic beauty and a generally gentle flow that sounds very much like Dvořák’s. The restraint of the Hermitage Piano Trio is notable here: everything is in its place, nothing is overdone, and the music flows and flowers naturally. The Elegy is one of only two Suk works for piano trio, the other being a slightly earlier (1889-1891) trio also heard on this recording. A much less ambitious work than Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 3, Suk’s is a student piece that in fact earned him admission to Dvořák’s  master class in composition. Suk’s trio contains elements similar to those favored by Dvořák himself, including modified folk dances and considerable warmth and lyricism. It is, however, somewhat on the thin side, being less than half as long as Dvořák’s Piano Trio No. 3 and much less emotionally exploratory – but it is, after all, a student work, and it does effectively showcase Suk’s abilities in forms ranging from dance to march. Again the Hermitage Piano Trio avoids trying to make the piece into something grander than it is: the work’s pleasantries come through clearly and without pretense. The two Suk works are separated on the recording by a world première: the Piano Trio “Rural Life in Bohemia” by Rudolf Friml (1879-1972) has not been recorded before. Friml’s Dvořák connection is less well-known than Suk’s but was significant: Dvořák was, for a time, his composition teacher. Nowadays Friml is remembered as an operetta, stage and film composer, but he did produce a substantial amount of concert-hall music and had, like Dvořák, a strong sense of Czech nationalism. Friml’s single-movement trio, written in 1918, is a brief five-section work that is brighter (and slighter) than anything else on this disc: despite its date, it shows no sign of postwar trauma or even questioning, instead offering a series of pleasant, wistful dances, at most mildly melancholic, interspersed with the sort of sweeping, swooning lyricism that made Friml’s stage and screen music so popular. Immediately appealing and determinedly surface-level throughout, Friml’s trio comes across as snapshots of a time long gone – old-style picture postcards, but in music – and sounds more like a paean to the past than do the earlier works by Dvořák and Suk. The mingling of Czech nationalism and late-Romantic harmonic sensibility, plus the intertwined lives of these three composers, show their different-but-related ways of processing their similar musical backgrounds, with the Hermitage Piano Trio doing a fine job of highlighting both the parallels among the works and their sometimes subtle differences of form and expression. 

     Just as Dvořák’s relationships with Suk and Friml were personal as well as musical, so a similar dual form of relationship existed between Dvořák and Brahms – but in this case it was Brahms, eight years older than Dvořák, who served as mentor as the two men developed their close and long-lasting friendship. The story is well-known of how Brahms paved the way for Dvořák to build an international reputation – all the while staying true to his own musical predisposition, which was quite different from the more-nationalistic one of Dvořák. Brahms interconnected musically and personally with other important figures as well: Clara Schumann for many years, Robert Schumann until his early death, and Richard Mühlfeld at the end of Brahms’ own creative career, to name three. Mühlfeld became first clarinetist of the Meiningen Court Orchestra in 1876, and it is intriguing to realize that until that point he had been a violinist – had he continued in that role, music would have been the poorer for it. As actually happened, Mühlfeld’s clarinet playing inspired Brahms, who had gone into self-imposed creative retirement, to reemerge compositionally and create four great clarinet-focused works: his quintet, trio and two sonatas that were Brahms’ last pieces of chamber music. The complete set of these four clarinet explorations receives sensitive and beautifully balanced performances from a bevy of Icelandic musicians on a new two-CD release from Sono Luminus. Clarinetist Rúnar Óskarsson is the headline performer, given the repertoire, but he is so ably abetted by the other players that he emerges as primus inter pares rather than an overarching presence. And the music is all the better for it: Brahms showed his mastery of blending in these four pieces, integrating the clarinet with other instruments with a level of subtlety that results in an ensemble sound in which everyone shares the spotlight even though the clarinet is, at the same time, in the forefront. The balancing act is quite a remarkable one, and performers who are sensitive to it – as these players are – are able to deliver chamber music that is quite unlike anything else Brahms wrote. The motivic interweaving of themes in the quintet, which is the largest-scale of these four works, is well-displayed in Óskarsson’s performance with the Siggi Quartet. The care with which Brahms positions the woodwind in accord with the piano and cello in the trio is matched here by the sensitivity that Helga Bryndís Magnúsdóttir and Sigurđur Bjarki Gunnarsson bring to their portions of the music. And the two sonatas – with which Brahms himself toured with Mühlfeld in readings that so impressed the composer that he gave all the fees to his clarinet partner – come across here as sublimely expressive, glowing instrumental pairings in which the back-and-forth between Óskarsson and Magnúsdóttir fits the musical meshing to perfection. 

     Connections between and among composers are musically meaningful in one way, those between and among the performances who re-create their music in another. Especially in chamber music, a kind of blurring of the self in favor of expressive mutuality goes a long way toward communicating a composer’s intentions and bringing the music’s feelings and meaning to an audience. The emotional expressiveness of composers such as Brahms and Dvořák benefits to an especially great degree from performers such as those heard in these two releases – who delve into the music in ways that draw composer and listener together in a melding of interdependence and understanding.

(++++) A LIFE WELL PLAYED

Life and Music: A Memoir. By Idil Biret with Dominique Xardel. Chestnut Hill Press. $35. 

     Autobiographies are awkward things: unbelievable when self-effacing, irritating when self-aggrandizing, prone to the triple temptation to become, at various points, maudlin, self-congratulatory and unduly modest. The flaws of the form come through with remarkable consistency, for, as Idil Biret points out in a different context, “Really, nothing reinvents itself.” 

     And right there is one way in which the aptly titled Life and Music stands out: Biret (born 1941) has thoughts that, ostensibly about music, are in fact about life both in and beyond the area to which she has devoted so many decades and in which she has produced so many literally noteworthy performances. 

     Much of this book is a translation by Gunesh Guran Gery of a work originally published 20 years ago in French and not previously available in English. That work, Une pianist turque en France, was built around conversations – in the form of exchanges of correspondence – between Biret and Dominique Xardel (born 1934), who among other things was editor-in-chief of the French version of Harvard Business Review. And there are indeed elements of the business of music discussed here, including a notorious and still-debated “Biret boycott” resulting from traditional record labels metaphorically “circling the wagons” to protect their turf (and profits) when Biret was making recordings for the then-upstart, then-budget label Naxos. But business is scarcely the primary focus of the book, and indeed, in a curious way, Biret herself is not the focus – certainly not the entirety of it. That is because so much of what Biret discusses with Xardel uses her experiences, and music itself, as jumping-off points for contemplation of and commentary on broader and wider issues. 

     Biret’s thinking is often expressed through startling observations – or, perhaps more accurately, in startling commentary about trenchant observations: “The pianistic concept has evolved a lot, often at random, since the 1960s, a decade that in many ways was still part of the nineteenth century. Since then the compositions are at the mercy of the interpreters and not the other way around as it generally should be. The large egos of today’s interpreters are offensive to the fragility of the well-known works of composers who could never have imagined such a change.” Notions born of experience and worthy of much further contemplation are packed into that half paragraph – about the 1960s, about the balance between composer and performer, about the “fragility” of traditional piano repertoire. Whether a reader agrees with Biret or not, her insights provoke nearly as much surprise and thought when verbalized as they do when communicated via the piano. 

     It is of course necessary to have some familiarity with classical music to appreciate Biret’s place in it, and some basic knowledge about repertoire and well-known performers to share fully in the perspectives that Biret offers. Life and Music is not a full-fledged biography, but there is enough background information in it to allow the casual reader, one not thoroughly versed in the ins and outs of the concert-music world, to understand Biret’s place in the pianistic firmament and to appreciate her often remarkably penetrating insights. Again and again, she challenges conventional wisdom in her words as she often does in her performances: “It seems to me that even now we have a romantic, a wrong idea of what a ‘career’ or a ‘reputation’ means.” But again and again, Life and Music shows the tremendous solidity on which Biret’s own career and reputation rest: the 80 photographs bound into the center of the book, arranged chronologically from 1946 to 2020, directly display her interactions with family, with the leadership of her native Turkey, and with some of the great performers and teachers with whom she has interacted throughout her long and distinguished career. 

     Readers interested in the mundane aspects of professional performance will find Biret’s thinking especially intriguing. “The sitting position permits proper breathing comfortably as long as you do not stoop. …You have to watch carefully for any signs of arthritis, follow a healthy diet, take vitamins, especially antioxidants. Do not smoke, drink lots of water and, once in a while, a glass of wine…” There is something rather charming in those remarks. And there is always a surprising or unexpected thought lurking on a nearby page: “I think it’s a good idea not to work with first-rate pianos, not to get used to the beautiful sound of an instrument. It’s more interesting to try to get a good sound from a mediocre piano.” 

     It is because Biret is an intermediary, an interpreter putting her creativity at the service of the creativity of others – of the composers whose work she creates and re-creates – that her thoughts, even when personal, resonate beyond herself, so that the focus of Life and Music is not the usual narrow one found in a book whose professed topic is a single individual. Indeed, Biret returns repeatedly to the theme – more of a theme and variations – of music as an art and music within the arts. Her thinking becomes a touchstone of engagement for anyone fortunate enough to encounter not only her performances but also the words she offers here: “Music is what you feel immediately, outwardly and within yourself. …Music goes beyond words, beyond colors, beyond forms. …When we think about music, we hear it within ourselves, in detail. We don’t need an instrument.” Perhaps not – but it helps to have an instrumentality. And that, as Life and Music makes abundantly clear, is exactly what Idil Biret is.

(++++) FORMS OF FAITH AND GRANDEUR

Mahler: Symphony No. 2. Wiebke Lehmkuhl, contralto; Nikola Hillebrand, soprano; MDR-Rundfunkchor Leipzig and Sinfonieorchester Basel conducted by Markus Poschner. Prospero. $22.99 (2 CDs). 

Bach: Cello Suites (complete). René Schiffer, cellos. AVIE. $26.99 (2 CDs). 

     Meticulous attention to detail, especially of pacing and dynamics, consistently marked Markus Poschner’s approach to his very extended and very in-depth consideration of Bruckner – and is now in evidence as he begins a Mahler cycle with a live recording of the “Resurrection” symphony on the Prospero label. The deep-seated spirituality underlying the symphony leads to an eventual proclamation of faith that is both hard-won and freely given to those who believe – a bit of a contradiction in terms that Mahler reflects throughout a symphony whose segments using large orchestra and chorus are counterbalanced by many others of quietude and delicacy. Poschner gets those quieter elements just right, along with the work’s expansiveness. The music really sounds like a funeral cortège in the first four minutes of the opening movement, the leisurely pacing in slower portions strongly contrasting with quicker ones. Quiet sections are very quiet, with Poschner drawing attention to the notable delicacy of Mahler’s scoring. The complete silence halfway through this movement is genuinely eerie in its stasis, while the overall impression is of a work in which the bucolic contrasts with the dramatic. Lest there be any question about the pacing that Mahler wanted for the second movement, he specified both Sehr gemächlich, “very leisurely,” and Nie eilen, “never rush.” But the note values themselves require alternating slower and faster sections, an apparent contradiction that is common in Mahler and that Poschner handles with sure understanding of the underlying unity of all the material. Then the third movement starts with a heavy opening timpani stroke that contrasts strongly with the quiet ending of what has gone before. Again Mahler is quite specific in what he wants here, labeling this exceedingly delicate Scherzo (with some contrasting outbursts) both calm and flowing. The music comes from Mahler’s earlier song setting about St.  Anthony of Padua’s sermon to the fish, calling up (for those who know that earlier work) the irony that “the sermon was wonderful but they remain the same,” a touch of irony and ambiguity that fits this part of the “Resurrection” symphony well: real change and full affirmation of faith will come later. The fourth movement, Urlicht, is here blessed (no pun intended) with the exceptional contralto voice of Wiebke Lehmkuhl, who is highly expressive at all volumes and, abetted by Poschner’s sensitive accompaniment, carefully explores the genuine emotion of the words. And then calm and peace are shattered by an exclamation from full orchestra that emerges here like sound sweeping a scene clean. What follows communicates a clear feeling of anticipation and yearning. In Poschner’s pacing, the proclamation of the brass at about eight minutes into the movement seems like an invitation to Heaven – but we are not there yet, given the portentous and conflict-ridden passage that follows. It is at this point that the full massive strength of the orchestra comes through – all the more effectively since Poschner has until now focused so much on quieter and more chamber-music-like passages. Although conflict and difficulty now become musically apparent, there is a sense of the music surging always toward peace. Against this backdrop, the very, very quiet choral entry is highly effective, and the gradual ascent of volume parallels the long-awaited ascent of the soul. Both soloists – Lehmkuhl and soprano Nikola Hillebrand – emote with great feeling; they are at their best when singing together. Poschner reserves another elegantly managed dip into the nearly inaudible right after the word auferstehn just five minutes before the end of this 84-minute performance. The result is that the very loud final chorus is all the more affirmative and effective. The interpretation, orchestral and vocal performances, and very fine sound on this two-CD release bode very well indeed for Poschner’s future plans for Mahler performances and recordings. 

     Huge instrumental vocal and instrumental forces are scarcely necessary for heartfelt expressions of belief and religious fervor: a single instrument can be more than enough. And that is what Bach used in his six Cello Suites, according to some out-of-the-box thinking by René Schiffer, who has been principal cellist of the Apollo’s Fire period-instrument ensemble since the group was founded in 1992. As an instrumental performer, Schiffer is one heck of a writer – and conversely, as a writer, he is one heck of a cellist. He makes all this clear in his essay on the Bach Cello Suites, even as he obscures, mostly deliberately, some of what he is saying. Schiffer clearly has fun with prose, and sometimes with trotting out remarks intended mostly to showcase a mixture of erudition and devil-may-care thinking: “Linda Ronstadt would not have been caught dead singing an American standard the way she learned from Maria Callas’s recordings to sing Puccini.” It is not always easy to know when Schiffer is being serious and when he is kidding his audience, as when, in writing about Suite No. 6, he talks about a third minuet “found in a recently discovered manuscript (unknown because I found it myself and have not told anyone about it yet).” Levity (or potential levity) aside, Schiffer has an intriguing view of the Cello Suites as being an instrumental tracing of the life of Christ, and he points to specific musical examples that, in his view, support that thesis. This makes it crucial to perform the suites exactly as their sequence is numbered, which is not the order in which many recordings present them (although this two-CD set from AVIE, of course, does so, following Schiffer’s determination). Yet if Schiffer is right about the underpinning he suggests – and it is certainly true that religion imbues everything in Bach – he is oddly unwilling to match Bach’s supposed “framing tale” with the trappings of the composer’s own time. Importantly in this regard, he uses the modern pitch standard of 440 Hz as his basis “because my instruments sound better in high pitch,” a somewhat shallow remark (and specious argument) that creates an unresolved conflict between “sounds better” and “sounds right” in terms of Schiffer’s approach. Also – and this is highly unusual – instead of merely opting for a violoncello piccolo with a fifth string for Suite No. 6, as has become customary in historically aware performances (and, by the by, helps support the “life of Christ” thesis musically), Schiffer uses that instrument for Suite No. 5 as well – and in scordatura tuning – simply because he feels like it: “I discovered that on my five-string violoncello piccolo…this suite sounded much more transparent.” Well, that is akin to the old “if Bach had had a Bechstein he would have written for piano” notion, or indeed to any argument for playing Bach on instruments that did not exist in his time – or, in Schiffer’s instrument’s case, on one that did exist but that Bach chose not to use in Suite No. 5. And does Schiffer really think the change of instrument somehow bolsters his theory about the Christ’s-life nature of the Cello Suites? What he writes is a blend of the fanciful with the thoughtfully analytical, so it can be hard to know how seriously to take some of what Schiffer says: does he believe it all himself? In reality, the "truth" of Schiffer’s notion of the undergirding of the Cello Suites is not especially significant – it is a guiding light, and every performer needs one. If it deepens the interpretation and thus the listening experience, then objective “right” or “wrong” scarcely matters. What does matter here, with or without the elaborate religious subtext that Schiffer suggests, is the sheer excellence of the performance of every individual movement of every one of the suites, and the feeling that Schiffer manages to convey that even though each collection of movements stands on its own, everything is intricately interrelated and part of a larger whole. It may be just as well to leave aside possible extramusical meanings, interesting or questionable instrumental choices, and clever if deliberately abstruse commentary, such as Schiffer’s remark that performing Suite No. 6 on a four-stringed cello is “somewhat the equivalent of playing Saint-Saëns’ Rondo capriccioso on the erdu.” What truly matters, what Schiffer offers musically, is sumptuous tone throughout a beautifully played, well-considered, elegantly presented, somewhat quirky presentation of music whose foundational meaning may be a matter of interpretation but whose spectacular beauty and felt-if-not-fully-understood significance emerge with full force from hands and instruments wielded with the tremendous skill and thoughtfulness that Schiffer possesses and that he so generously shares through this always-engaging recording.