As with the last visit, there was a change to the advertised programme and we got no.5 rather than no.6, due to a recent injury setback that meant Pavlos wasn't best prepared for the technical demands of no.6.
No matter. It was an opportunity for him to explain about no.5 and he was very enlightening about this 'bible of cello music' re-discovered by Pablo Casals, the origins of which we know sdo little about. If you took John Eliot Gardiner's book as evidence, you'd think the Cello Suites and Well-Tempered Klavier were peripheral pieces in the oeuvre but Gardiner is a cantata man less disposed to extrapolating on this lone instrumental voyage.
With the suites being so central to the repertoire, Pavlos and all other cellists are up against some mighty legacy in essaying any account. Casals, Tortelier, Rostropovich, Yo Yo Ma and Natalie Clein are five I've heard and that is betting without Isserlis. But he does well not to overdo it. The music is morte than capable of speaking for itself and Pavlos is wise to allow it to with intrusive flamboyance or exaggeration. More than once I was reminded of Marin Marais as the movements began but that was more likely my mind wandering rather than anything Pavlos intended.
Drawing our attention to the Sarabande in no. 5, he compared it to C20th minimalism, the way it is pared down to a single, unornamented line in which he needed an alternative strategy to the deft embellishments he achieved elsewhere. He described the 'stillness' of the movement, which I'm sure could bring with it any amount of meanings in different circumstances but today sounded like a lament for our troubled times when Her Majesty has seen fit to mention such things herself in a birthday message.
Soon after the subsequent Gavotte which in comparison sounds more like The Flight of the Bumble Bee, Suite no. 5 ends not with a dramatic crescendo but diminishes gently and then stops in a brilliant, brilliant piece of understatement by J.S. beautifully delivered by Pavlos.
And he is not the first to have offered Casals' own Song of the Birds as an encore, a haunting, noticeably Spanish short musical poem of soft pizzicato and evocative bowed lines that make you wonder firstly if Casals should have ben more of a composer and secondly if this piece is not a natural footnote to any performance of the Bach and eventually audiences will feel short-changed if they aren't given it.
Marvellous work by a charming and devoted musician, full of integrity, sincerity and belief. Masters though the above litany of cello world superstars might be, they can't deliver quite the intimacy in the Albert Hall that Pavlos Carvalho did in a small chapel down a side road off one of the main streets of Chichester on a Saturday lunchtime. Hats, as they were in a chapel anyway, off to him.
