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The Cello Suites and Bach's Cello Suites CDs
Eric Siblin Hardcover, 319 pages; 2009
Members' Price (UD1362): $20.40

  Listen to Casals in the prelude of the third suite: it begins as a glorious collapse, picks up the pieces, gathers momentum, and plunges into a maelstrom, straining, nearly breaking apart, only to emerge with bouquets of chords and a declaration of love.

  In the autumn of 2000, at a concert in Toronto, pop-music critic Eric Siblin fell in love with Johann Sebastian Bach's exquisite Cello Suites. Composed in 1720, the suites were long considered "only a collection of exercises." But in 1890, a remarkably talented young Catalan cellist named Pablo Casals rediscovered a copy of the music sheets in a secondhand shop and, a few decades later, breathed tremendous new life into the suites via his seminal recordings of them. The Cello Suites is a fascinating dual biography of Bach and Casals, as well as an infectiously enthusiastic account of Siblin's rhapsodic relationship with Bach's music. You'll definitely want to listen to the Cello Suites after--and while!--reading this book, so we're offering them on CD, with Pablo Casals on violoncello. (CH)