Carolina Performing Arts Event: Johnny Gandelsman, Violin: Feb. 9, 2020

One autumn evening, shortly after ending a ten-year stint as a pop-music columnist for the Montreal Gazette, Eric Siblin attended a concert at Toronto's Royal Conservatory of Music. There, something unlikely happened: he fell in love with a piece of classical music -- Bach's cello suites. Part biography, part music history, and part literary mystery, The Cello Suites weaves together three dramatic stories: The first features Johann Sebastian Bach and the missing manuscript of his suites from the eighteenth century; the second is that of Pablo Casals and his incredible discovery of the manuscript in Spain in the early twentieth century; and the third is Eric Siblin's own infatuation with the suites in the twenty-first century.

Author Christoph Wolff presents a new picture of Bach that brings to life this towering figure of the Baroque era. This engaging new biography portrays Bach as the living, breathing, and sometimes imperfect human being that he was while bringing to bear all the advances of the last half-century of Bach scholarship. Wolff demonstrates the intimate connection between the composers life and his music showing how Bach's superb inventiveness pervaded his career as musician composer performer scholar, and teacher. And throughout we see Bach in the broader context or his time its institutions, traditions and influences.

This pioneering book by an acclaimed expert is the first to discuss all of Bach's unaccompanied pieces in one volume, including an examination of crucial issues of style and composition type and the options open to interpretation and performance. David Ledbetter, a leading expert on Bach, provides the historical background to Bach's instrumental works, as well as detailed commentaries on each work.   Ledbetter argues that Bach's unaccompanied works--the six suites for solo cello, six sonatas and partitas for solo violin, seven works for lute, and the suite for solo flute--should be considered together to enable one piece to elucidate another. This illuminating and significant book is essential for professionals, performers, students, or anybody who wishes to learn more about Bach's music.