Bach Cello Suites and Sonatas – Antonio Janigro

There used to be a kind of cellist who played Bach as though the microphone weren’t there, and Antonio Janigro — Zagreb’s great cultural export, a man who gave up a chunk of his playing career to raise an orchestra from nothing — was very much that kind of cellist. Doremi has now gathered his old Vanguard recordings of the solo suites and the gamba sonatas, plus a pair of orchestral makeweights, onto three discs, and the results are a fascinating time capsule. Whether you’ll want to live inside that capsule is another matter.

Start with the obvious: this is pre-authenticity Bach, thick with vibrato, the bow arm doing a lot of emotional heavy lifting. Janigro’s tone is burnished, almost cello-as-baritone in its weight, and he never met a Sarabande he didn’t want to slow down. The Sarabande of the Suite No. 1 in G major barely moves; by the time we reach the E flat major Suite No. 4, the Sarabande has become something closer to an adagio religioso, its central trill dragged out until it loses all rhythmic tension. I kept thinking of a church organist improvising on a hymn tune rather than a dance musician keeping faith with a courtly idiom. Fournier, disc not long afterward, is sometimes just as expansive in tempo — but Fournier’s rubato breathes within the bar line, while Janigro’s often just stops the clock.

The minuets fare worse. In the D minor suite they’re almost funereal, more suited to a cortège than a ballroom. There’s a doggedness to some of the faster movements too — the Gigue of the C major Suite No. 3 trudges when it should skip, weighed down by Janigro’s habit of landing hard on every downbeat. And yet — and this is the frustrating thing about this set — just when you’re ready to write the whole project off as a relic of pre-war Romanticism transplanted to the LP era, he does something wonderful. The C major suite’s Prélude has a terrific sweep and cumulative energy, the arpeggios rolled with real left-hand security, and there are episodes throughout where that huge, dark tone simply pays off on its own terms, Casals-adjacent without being an imitation.

Remember the field he was working in. By the mid-1950s, when these suites were set down, Casals’s 1936–39 Abbey Road recordings were still the unavoidable moral and interpretive authority, all crags and declamation. Janigro doesn’t have Casals’s rhetorical daring, nor his sudden flares of temper. What he offers instead is consistency — a long, unbroken line of tone, beautifully engineered, if you like your Bach poured rather than carved. Within a few years Starker and then Fournier would arrive with cleaner articulation and more rhythmic bite, and the suites would never again sound quite so unhurried on disc.

The three sonatas for cello and harpsichord (or piano, depending on performer preference — here genuinely a continuo-style harpsichord) find Janigro partnered by Robert Veyron-Lacroix, an elegant, somewhat undersung Parisian player whose discography deserves more attention than it gets. Veyron-Lacroix made his reputation largely in early music circles, though those who dug deeper into his catalog found an artist equally persuasive in Poulenc and Milhaud — a musician of real range, in other words, not a specialist pigeonholed by instrument. His playing here is crisp, pearly, carefully balanced against Janigro’s weightier contributions; he doesn’t try to out-Baroque his partner, which given the cellist’s tonal habits would have been a losing argument anyway. The G major Sonata, BWV 1027, comes off the best of the three, with some genuinely lovely give-and-take in the slow movement. The G minor, BWV 1029, feels more effortful, Janigro pushing hard against music that wants leaner articulation than he’s prepared to supply.

The two makeweights are curiosities rather than essentials. The Kelemen arrangement of the organ work BWV 592 for cello and orchestra is pleasant enough, Janigro leading I Solisti di Zagreb with evident affection, though it’s hard to imagine anyone returning to it often. The Boccherini B flat concerto, heard here in Grützmacher’s heavily reworked, nineteenth-century-friendly edition rather than the authentic score Rostropovich and others later championed, is a reminder of how differently that composer used to be presented — fattened up, Brahms-ified almost, with Milan Horvat and the Prague Symphony providing sympathetic orchestral support. Janigro clearly relishes the bravura passagework; the slow movement sings.

Taken as a whole, this is a set for the historically curious rather than for anyone building a first library of Bach’s cello music. The engineering has held up reasonably — Vanguard’s tape was never glamorous, but Doremi’s transfers are clean and the cello’s lower register has real body to it. For those of us who remember when this was simply how Bach sounded on records — unhurried, richly bowed, more vocal than architectural — there’s real nostalgic pleasure here. For anyone coming fresh to the suites, I’d point first to Fournier, or to Tortelier’s songful 1960 Paris set, and treat Janigro as a fascinating supplement: a document of a style of Bach playing that the historical-reading movement would, within a generation, make almost unrecognizable.