Occasionally I’ll be on Facebook and a photo from 2007 will pop up as a ‘memory’. I’ll pass through a sequence of emotions: surprise, nostalgia, then incredulity. Did I really look that young? I wonder whether Jean-Guihen Queyras experiences similar sentiments. This set of Bach’s Cello Suites arrives 17 years after his first, also for Harmonia Mundi. And as splendid as that recording was and is, this album makes the then 39-year-old sound like a youngster indeed. Now we witness a master at his craft. There is the most satisfying sense that Queyras knows the place and function of every single note in each musical sentence but isn’t precious about it: it’s magisterial yet somehow casual in its state of play.
Do I occasionally miss the carefree resonance from 2007? Admittedly, yes. Take, for example, the Gavottes in the Suite No 6 in D. But with Queyras’s now slightly intellectualised logic, we’re rewarded with a fuller gamut of colours and a rhetoric that imperceptibly fuses play and reason. For more exploration in full flow, head to the Minuets of the Suite No 2 in D minor. Purists might balk at the pizzicato; I love it. Then the sheer extremeness of playing in the following Gigue, in which Queyras barely sketches Bach’s notes into audibility (especially after the 2’20” mark).
The delightfully fumbled closing of the Allemande from the Suite No 1 in G is a brilliant example of this aesthetic of liveness. There’s a narrative quality to Queyras’s thoughtfulness that, when compared to his 2007 recording, never gets trapped in rhapsodic marvel. Harmonies and sequences are spelt out as improvisation, as live as sparkling water.
Accompanying the album is a Blu ray that documents Queyras’s longstanding collaboration with the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker through a filmed performance called Mitten wir im Leben sind/Bach6CelloSuiten. It is stunning. In squeaky shoes, De Keersmaeker and her troupe trace Fibonaccian geometries in spirograph-like joy across a huge stage, sometimes in worryingly close proximity to Queyras’s bow. Director Corentin Leconte has done an extraordinary job, creating long shots, often spanning an entire Bach movement, that then pan out in perplexing seamlessness. The omitted Bach movements go unexplained (is the absence of music in the Sarabande in E flat something to do with the golden ratio? Or simply that Queyras is preparing for the scordatura of Suite No 5?).
As difficult as it is for this music critic to admit, the movements without Queyras are stunning. On the repeat of the second half of the Allemande from the Suite No 3 in C, everything stops: time freezes, to then melt, the dancers continuing ‘without’ the music. But of course, even in inaudibility it’s still playing. De Keersmaeker’s choreography doesn’t merely adorn a specific soundtrack but rather supplies gestures and movements that embody Bach’s music. Even as Queyras’s bow is still, then, or when he is off camera, Bach is being played. In this astonishing collaboration, the Suites move from being ‘just’ music to the chosen timekeeper of life.