Bach Cello Suites Arranged – Smith and Tamestit

There is something almost perverse about transplanting Bach’s cello suites onto an instrument the composer never imagined for them — and yet Hopkinson Smith’s new album, three suites rendered on the German theorbo, makes the perverse feel inevitable, even necessary. Lutenists have been raiding the cello repertoire for decades (Smith himself recorded the suites on Baroque lute years ago), but this latest venture, using a long-necked theorbo with its extended bass courses, finds him after something different: not transcription as novelty act but transcription as excavation, a way of hearing harmonic implications Bach left latent in a single melodic line.

Smith plays these suites the way a scholar reads a palimpsest: slowly, attentively, alert to the ghost of polyphony buried in Bach’s unaccompanied writing for cello. Where a cellist must imply chords through arpeggiation and bow pressure, Smith’s instrument lets him actually voice them, stacking open strings beneath the tune until the music blooms outward into something closer to what the ear imagines when it hears the Prelude of the First Suite played well. Except now the imagining has been made audible. The sound itself is woody, resonant, prone to a long decay that Smith exploits rather than fights. He is not in a hurry. He says so himself, in booklet notes that amount to a credo: the silence beyond the music, he writes, is a “constant friend.” That’s a lutenist’s sensibility through and through, inherited from a tradition — Dowland, Weiss — in which the instrument’s natural resonance does half the expressive work and the player’s job is to get out of its way at the right moments.

It makes for playing of great dignity. The Second Suite, often read as the dark night of this triptych, acquires under Smith’s hands a kind of noble reticence. He doesn’t milk the D minor pathos, doesn’t lean into the Sarabande’s harmonic suspensions for easy effect. Instead there’s a steadiness, almost a liturgical calm, that some listeners will find deeply satisfying and others will find frustratingly cool. I confess to mixed feelings here. There are stretches — the Courante of the Third Suite, for one — where I wanted more adrenaline, more sense of a dance actually being danced, and got instead a kind of processional grandeur.

Compare this with what else is on offer right now. Naïve, oddly, released this disc alongside Antoine Tamestit’s viola transcriptions of the same three suites, and the contrast is instructive, almost comically so. Tamestit, playing a Stradivarius with a baroque bow, is quicksilver where Smith is granite: his tempos run faster across the board, four minutes faster in No. 1, a startling six minutes faster in No. 3. His phrasing bounces. His tone is dark but never heavy. Tamestit sounds like someone who has absorbed the historically informed reading movement into his bloodstream and simply plays. The difference crystallizes in the Third Suite: Tamestit sounds thrilled to be alive, Smith sounds like he’s contemplating eternity. Both readings are legitimate. Neither is “correct.” Bach left us a text abstract enough to support both visions. It survives translation into timbres and idioms its composer could never have conceived: a violist’s Stradivarius, a lutenist’s twelve-course theorbo, Walton’s cello suite transcriptions for guitar, the Yo-Yo Ma cello readings that made this music a pop-culture totem in the 1990s.

My own preference tilts toward urgency over grandeur. I’ll take Tamestit’s fleetness, or for that matter Rysanov’s richer, more Romantic viola readings of the Simon Rowland-Jones transcriptions, over Smith’s patrician reserve nine times out of ten. But Smith is not wrong, only different, and there’s real value in a performer willing to let Bach breathe this slowly, this spaciously. The theorbo itself is gorgeous to hear in long stretches, those low courses ringing out under the melody like a cathedral’s stone floor underfoot. Whether you want to live there for seventy-odd minutes is a matter of temperament, yours and Smith’s alike.

A beautifully recorded, thoughtfully argued project, then, one I respect more than I love, and suspect many listeners will feel the reverse.