BACH Cello Suites, BWV 1007–1012 • Suren Bagratuni (vc) • BLUE GRIFFIN BGR 119 (2 CDs: 131:56)

Two things struck me immediately upon putting on Bagratuni’s new recording of Bach’s solo cello suites. The first was the overly resonant recorded sound that inflates the performances, which seem also to have been recorded closely enough to capture Bagratuni’s occasional groans and deep breathing. The other was the speed with which he took the Prelude to the Suite in G. There was a time when these pieces were supposed to be impossibly difficult. Bagratuni, who won a silver medal at the 1986 Tchaikovsky Competition, doesn’t seem to notice. He scurries through the Prelude as if he is looking for a challenge until he decides to hold a climactic note and let it drift off into space.

This is most impressive playing, but it’s also slightly unnerving. Like many listeners of a certain age, I learned these pieces through the hardly restrained Pablo Casals, about whom Stravinsky famously said he’s made a career of playing Bach as if it were Brahms. Later I came to admire the patrician recordings of Pierre Fournier. It is almost shocking to go from the dignified performance of that Prelude in G by Fournier to Bagratuni’s oversized scamperings. Of course, he plays the various minuets with more grace, but still, the emphasis is on the size of the sound as he digs in. There’s little of the lilt that Fournier brings to some of these movements, or the terraced dynamics that someone like Yo-Yo Ma employs. Bagratuni’s is a more rugged Bach, less nuanced than my preferred recordings, but perhaps to some listeners’ taste. Nonetheless, I am wondering what it would be like to hear Bagratuni live in a hall with excellent acoustics. I hope I get the chance. Michael Ullman