Bach and some modern understandings of the Baroque
I was trained as a “modern” cellist, most of my career was on modern instruments with endpins and metal strings, always exploring any new developments in each, and more. But as a modern player, I also studied scores, searching for authoritative “urtext” editions, manuscripts, and first editions of the “standard” repertoire. The idea was to […]
Regarding Beethoven’s Sonatas for Piano and Cello
Beethoven’s five Sonatas for piano and cello offer a magnificent distillation of twenty years of development as a composer into two hours of listening. His mastery of the conventional musical forms and structures of the time was clear from his earliest published works, and that mastery made it possible for him to subvert […]