There are as many ways to play Bach cello suites as there are to draw breath. You can treat these pieces as a map to anywhere you want to go. You can play them inexorably as if you are being mowed down like a holy instrument. You can play them as if you are being haunted by the memory of previous interpretations. You can play them like a series of private philosophical musings. Or, if you are Kim Kashkashian, you can play them on viola.
Kashkashian has been exploring the outer reaches of the viola for years, building up a dense thicket of recordings where she casts the instrument in a series of meaty roles: In Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” her viola was a bony branch scraping a window, a voice calling out nervously into gaping silence. In Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s “Signs, Games, and Messages”, her viola filtered into blackness like vents peeking into a collapsed mine shaft. Her decision to tackle Bach’s cello suites is an ambitious one, but in the context of her career, it is just the latest audacious leap in an unbroken series.
The viola can never have the cello’s resonance, but it has a nearly-human tone that will always make it an excellent character actor—the aural equivalent of a lined, stern-browed face that grabs the camera. Kashkashian’s tone has a mournful, woody tang, dark and foreboding and ink-dipped, that makes it a beguiling Bach interpreter. There are moments in these pieces where the instrument’s peculiarities poke through—the string crossings in the opening of the famous Suite 1 are slightly stiff-legged—but they help give defining markings to pieces that might otherwise wear smooth from familiarity.
The most radical aspect of playing Bach is how exposed it leaves you. There are no obscuring pyrotechnics to dazzle with, nowhere to hide a moment of faltering uncertainty. Unlike a concerto, where a single instrument hurls itself up against the massed forces or the orchestra and beats it back, they offer no hero’s triumph to applaud. Solo Bach is inherently private music, insofar as truly holy experiences tend to be private, and for classical musicians, they are the most hallowed of proving grounds—you don’t turn to them to show the world how you play. You turn to them to show how you exist.
Kashkashian steps into this unforgiving spotlight with grace and poise. There is something very corporeal in her interpretations: In her hands, these works are body music, rooted in breath and wood and muscle. This relationship is underlined by the intimacy of the close mic’ing: You often hear her breathing in between phrases, the slight flutter of the string crossings and the dry rasp of the bow. The Courante movement of the G Major bristles with ungainly and infectious energy—the courante is a light-stepping dance, but Kashkashian turns it into an invigorating chorus of heavy-thudding peasant boots.
The mood of her interpretation is searching, earthbound, human—she doesn’t treat solo Bach like divine math out of reach of mortal understanding. Her tone is sumptuous, moaning, throaty, with a catch of ache snagged in the instrument’s midrange. Her phrasing in the Préludes always seems to be worrying away at a nagging question—you can feel urgency in the way she presses up against her own tempo slightly in the Prelude to the D Minor suite. Her Bach is furrowed-brow Bach, crisis-of-faith Bach, toiling Bach. Her instrument has never sounded lovelier or humbler than it does here.
