This concert was live-streamed as part of the Spring 2022 Series. The video is no longer online but other concerts are available to watch in full here: Wigmore Hall Concert Video Library

Download the PDF programme here. Reproduction and distribution is strictly prohibited.

Bach’s six solo cello suites remain not only one of the summits of the repertoire for the instrument but have won an equally legendary status among the entire classical repertoire as a whole: music historian Wilfrid Mellers described them as ‘monophonic music wherein a man has created a dance of God.’ Thought to date from Bach’s period as Kapellmeister in Köthen, they are generally dated to the years 1717-20. Unpublished until 1824, the suites only really became well known due to the advocacy of Pablo Casals, who first encountered them in 1889 and who studied and performed them in the early 20th Century: it was he who first recorded them in the late 1930s.