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Winona Zelenka recording the Bach Cello Suites
A Cellist's Reflections
My journey with Bach began at around age 10, a year
or so after we'd moved to Toronto and I'd started studying with Bill
Findlay of the Toronto Symphony. He had me learning major repertoire
as early as possible. Meanwhile, I listened to LPs with my Dad, who
had been a flutist in his native Slovakia and had a great collection.
I remember one day coming in to a lesson and playing the Prelude of
the First Suite, and when I was done Bill said "Have you been listening
to Casals?" and I nodded, amazed. He said, "OK, you'll have
to stop doing that for now, and let's get the metronome out." By
the time I was 13 I had learned all the Suites and in particular was
playing parts of the Sixth in local Kiwanis competitions - that Suite
being the most challenging. I always loved practicing Bach more than
anything else, and was quoted after one Kiwanis win as saying that I
would "cheat" on my concerto practice by switching to Bach
whenever I could. The approach of the time was the romantic Casals idea:
big sound, lots of vibrato, and fingerings that went up each string
for dynamic effect rather than crossing over to the next string as soon
as possible, which I would later learn is more consistent with historic
Baroque practice. My next teacher, the virtuoso poet of the cello Vladimir
Orloff, brought a similarly romantic approach from Vienna.
When I started at Indiana University under Janos Starker, at age 17,
a new Bach phase began that was about playing the cello as cleanly and
perfectly as possible. Starker was a genius at teaching the kinesiology
of cello-playing: he spoke constantly about getting rid of physical
tension and of performing the various motions required in an organic,
circular manner. He taught us to be self-analyzing and self-prescribing.
I performed most of the Suites while at Indiana and absorbed Starker's
cellistic ideas of bowing, phrasing and fingering: everything should
be geared towards beautiful sound production and perfect evenness and
consistency of tone. And at this point, in the 1980s, people still did
not favour open strings in Bach, at least not in the American schools
- certainly Josef Gingold and all the other string teachers at Indiana
were teaching us to play with vibrato all the time, and an open string
was considered too "dead". But Starker taught us to strive
for extreme cleanliness and purity of intonation, with the shifts as
hidden as possible, and bow speed and dynamics planned and controlled.
We developed disciplined ears.
My next teacher, in London, England, was William Pleeth, who was famous
for having taught Jacqueline Du Pré. His son Anthony Pleeth is
an accomplished baroque and modern cellist, and historically informed
baroque playing was obviously much more prevalent in England at that
time than it was in the U.S. William Pleeth opened my eyes to a completely
different way of playing Bach. While Starker gave his students all the
technical tools we needed to be great musicians, Pleeth took a solid
technical foundation for granted, focusing instead on how the music
works, and on finding ways to make that clear to the listener. He took
me through the Third Suite and showed me how to emphasize the motivic
material through choices of bowings, with completely opposite results
much of the time to what I'd been used to. He encouraged imaginative
freedom within a musical phrase; he would ask you to come up with a
different interpretation of a phrase after you'd played it, then play
a third version himself, then talk about the different places where
the phrase could peak, and the ways you could bring that out. It was
the opposite of Starker's approach, yet in the end, I felt that these
two mentors met in the middle, attaining a similar balance of freedom
and discipline in their interpretations.
I was with Pleeth for only 18 months, and then started my professional
career. Had we done more than the Third Suite together perhaps he would
have introduced me to the original scordatura tuning of the Fifth Suite,
which no teacher had mentioned previously. Incredibly, the first time
I heard anyone play the Fifth that way - with the top string of the
cello tuned down a tone from A to G - was when a student brought it
to me in 2006.
In recent years I've listened to recordings of Anner Bylsma and other
cellists who are devoted to historically inspired performance practice,
but my latest great influence is the Italian viola da gamba player Paolo
Pandolfo. His incredible freedom of expression has excited my creative
soul, and his embellishments are amazingly beautiful and sound completely
spontaneous. I have been so jealous of the wonderful harmonies that
he adds with those huge gamba chords, sometimes sounding so orchestral,
and with some unusual embellishments, that I attempted to add a few
to my own performance, especially in the Sixth Suite.
My years as an orchestral player have also brought some interesting
baroque influences, through colleagues who brought baroque bows to rehearsals,
and through visiting conductors attuned to baroque performance practice
- Nicholas McGegan and Helmut Rilling in Toronto; Harry Bicket at the
Santa Fe Opera. I have become more familiar with a style of playing
that features the pure sound of open strings, and that treats vibrato
as the exception rather than the rule, with expression coming from the
different strokes and nuances of the bow rather than the left hand.
I've come to appreciate the use of the cello not just as a melodic instrument
but as a sort of vibraphone where you can activate many overtones, allowing
the sound to become so much freer and more complex by doing so; in this
way you increase your colour palette in many ways. I now use my ideas
for fingerings to express different colours and provoke various emotions
- for a darker and more closed mood, I will stay on a string as the
line goes up, but to express something more open and perhaps excitable
I will stay close to and use open strings. Vibrato has become another
tool for expression for me, used less in an automatic fashion and more
to enhance the overtones of a chord or to emphasize specific places
in a melodic line.
These recordings represent the incredible musical odyssey through the
Bach Suites that I've had the privilege to travel. In some ways the
journey has been typical of a cellist of my generation: from the ultra-romanticism
of Casals, which is the starting point for the post-Bach performance
tradition of these suites, to the modernist logic of Starker, to a European
school that has been more open to historical performance practice than
the North American establishment has been.
At the same time, the journey has been like the growth of my bones,
or my consciousness, so much a part of me that I cannot imagine myself
without these works. The search is always for the voice that Bach intended
to convey - orchestral, operatic or choral - and for the true meaning
in Bach's compositions, the intellectual and emotional depth of which
have always been my passionate goal to express. It is my life's work,
as it is for every cellist who knows the Suites.
I continue to believe that there is nothing in human experience that
can't be said with this amazing music.
Winona Zelenka
From the CD liner notes
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