6 Suites - Solo Cello
BACH

When you think cello, you think of Bach's immortal cello suites. The suites take center stage in the cello literature. They are timeless and beautiful and accompany their students to the highest level. Appropriately and surprisingly there are countless editions of the suites. But the composer's autograph has not come down to us. It is lost and this circumstance has always been a major challenge for editors. The furnace surviving handwritten sources and the original first edition of 1824 differ in many details, the articulation and phrasing being particularly ambiguous. At Bärenreiter, having published the New Bach Edition and presently publishing the New Bach Edition-Revised, we feel particularly committed to the cello suites. We have approached the editorial problems from several angles and have published editions that meet the needs of students and professional performers alike. This new edition, based on volume 4 of the New Bach Edition - Revised (NBArev), now complete Bärenreiter's collection of the cello suite editions. Andrew Talle has fundamentally reassessed the relations between the survivors and the conclusions of their evaluation of the genesis of the suites. His assessments are expanded with thorough discussions of the instrument for which the suites were conceived and interpretative practices in Bach's day. The musical text of the book is based on these findings. It approaches the composer's original intentions as far as the sources will permit. Details about articulation were considered to be viable and they were added to the musical text when they appeared in the majority of the sources. This edition does not present a perfect reconstruction of the autograph autograph- no editor could claim to do so. Instead, I have attempted to provide musicians and scholars with a reliable version of the musical survival of the six cello suites and to shed light on the options which the Bach sources offer. "