Cellist Andrei Ioniță - Johann Sebastian Bach’s Integral of Suites for Solo Cello - Music Box, January 13th and 20th, 2025

Interview with cellist Andrei Ioniță

In December 2024, the publisher Radio House published a new album signed by the cellist Andrei Ioniță, including the concert recording of Bach’s integral of suites for solo cello from an event that had taken place at the Romanian Athenaeum on October 29th, 2023.

It’s an album that captures a mature and extremely talented artist who with creativity and intelligence confidently navigates Johann Sebastian Bach’s world of sheet music, a remarkable discographic release that I discussed about with Andrei Ioniță at the end of 2024.

First, I want to ask how you remember this recital from a year ago, which has now been transformed into a disk.

This recital was a special project, a wish of mine to conquer this Mount Everest of the cello repertoire. And with the opportunity of my artistic residency at the Philarmonic Orchestra “George Enescu” I wished to have this recital on the Romanian Athenaeum’s stage. I don’t think there could’ve been a better location and stage for such a repertoire. I also thought it was a concert that was very easy to sell - it’s only an artist, an instrument, and one composer.

Truthfully, in the end, it was a challenge, an endurance test, to perform the entire cycle of the 6 solo cello suites, but it was an unforgettable experience. I was thankful for the fact that the hall was full - not just in the beginning, they were still there in the third hour of the concert and all the way to the recital’s end. At the end of the day, it was one of the highlights of my career.

Here we are now, this memorable recital transformed into a disk. It’s not the first time one of Bach’s works is featured on one of your disks. After all, you also had a suite by Johann Sebastian Bach on the one made for the BBC New Generation Artist project. I want to ask, putting face-to-face these two recordings with Bach that you now have in your portfolio, what do you think about them? How would you characterize them?

Any live recording acquires much freer valences and when playing Bach’s suites I was most preoccupied with highlighting every detail as convincingly as possible. We are speaking about the respective dance’s articulations, about polyphony… about the structure of every dance, and the phrasing in large lines, as well as the micro phrasing of each measure, I tried to highlight them in the most convincing way possible. Moreover, I obviously allowed myself to add more embellishments in a live concert. This combination of structure as well as effervescence and freedom is what has always captivated me about these suites and I hope this combination can be felt on the CD too.

What instrument did you play?

I played one of luthier Filippo Fasser’s instruments from Brescia. It’s an instrument I’ve been playing since 2022 and it brings me great joy to discover and rediscover it every time.

How old is this instrument?

Well, it’s already 20 years old. It’s an instrument made in 2004. The Giovanni Battista Rogeri instrument that I was borrowing from the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben Foundation from Hamburg, unfortunately, I had to return right in February of this year. As it happens, just last week I got to listen to my instrument again in the hands of the next foundation’s scholarship. I was part of the commission for an international contest in Berlin.

I asked about the instrument because, while performing baroque music, it has an important role to play or can determine whether the music is performed historically or not. After all, we are talking about these currents that are already almost a hundred years old about interpretation in style or the recreation of what would have been during the composer’s time. Has this aspect been important to you or is it, generally, important to recreate it in a way that Bach could’ve heard? Actually, do we know what Bach could’ve heard?

Based on the studies from the last decades, it looks like we should be able to reconstruct in a general way the phrasing and the articulation of that respective time. What is interesting about Bach’s suites is the edition problem, because we don’t have the composer’s original manuscript, we are guiding ourselves based on 6 other manuscripts, and other sources, one of them being Anna Magdalena Bach. And the way we tried to place the bows and decide on some bows is, somehow, by comparing Anna Magdalena Bach’s mistakes that she’s done in her manuscripts for the solo violin works with Johann Sebastian Bach’s original and, in a way, deduce what mistakes Anna Magdalena Bach could’ve done in her own cello works manuscript.

After all, Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the composers who had written so clearly! And these structures, monadic as well as polyphonic, are so striking that you can look at the notes without there being any type of bow noted, you can analyze harmonically, formally, structurally and decide - obviously, based on a certain musical education and musical instinct - these things.

When talking about the interpretation and the baroque style, clearly, non-vibrato was the main way to play. The vibrato was seen like trills, an embellishment. At the same time, it wasn’t a mistake for a vibrato to show up during a specific note or chord, to emphasize the warmth of that chord or sound.

I have also listened, for example, to Mozrt’s Requiem played completely non-vibrato and I don’t know if it managed to convince me personally. But now we’re talking about personal preferences.

What I wanted to emphasize and I think is important about this disk is that the music is actually made to be understood by the audience it’s trying to reach nowadays and that, generally speaking, I believe that an interpretive version is good when it is convincing, when the artist has something to say, to convey, both intellectually and emotionally. I believe that this disk meets all the criteria to be an exceptional interpretation that is free and has a little something from the 18th century, from Bach’s time, but it’s much more than this, first of all, because Bach had an exceptional mind.

I believe what is important is what we think Bach’s music tells us today and I believe it has a lot to say.

With all this said, after you have spent your time picking apart Bach’s brain, what can you tell us about him?

The 6 suites are truly an incursion through the composer’s inner universe because every suite has a different character and atmosphere.

Suite No. 1, heaving that famous prelude, I would actually name it Prelude-Suite, because it is defined by simplicity and, in a way, sets the tone for the entire cycle.

Suite No. 2 is extremely somber, we could say it has funerary valences and I found it interesting that there’s such a big contrast between the first and second suites all of a sudden.

Suite No. 3 might be the most harmonious one. We’re talking about the C major tonality which is also used by the instrument’s harmonics and tuning. We also have what is possibly the second most loved part from Bach’s cello repertoire after the prelude in Suite No. 1, more precisely the Bourree.

The next suite, No. 4, I thought was the most special one. It’s pretty difficult to describe in just a couple of words. However, we are entering the keyboard instruments’ sonorities territory. Basically, the Suite No. 4 prelude is composed of arpeggios broken into 48 measures, and each one of these 48 measures has a different harmonic progression. We can already imagine a bass organ pedal sound, followed by a harmonic improvisation over it. It’s also the suite where I have allowed myself the most freedom for embellishments because I felt a certain flair, let’s say the most dancing flair, the most baroque of all.

Suite No. 5 is my favorite. It’s the most dramatic one. I like the grave sonorities. That different tuning of the instrument especially thought out for the fifth suite and more precisely the tuning of the high string to a lower key, toward G, already brings us to a much darker tone. The Suite No. 5 prelude is also one of the masterpieces of the entire cycle. It’s basically a work written for an organ but transcribed for the cello. It’s also the longest prelude containing an overture-type intro, a fugato (so we also have a fugue here among these suites, not just cellists)... and my favorite movement and the one that I consider the most special in the entire cycle is Sarabanda, which is full of dissonances never heard before and which almost takes us to foreign plains of existence, inhuman. But at the same time, we can observe - in my opinion, generally when it comes to Bach, even though his music was written very vigorously - there is an air that I don’t want to call romantic, but a very emotional air. And, yes, his music is the closest to divinity, but at the same time, human suffering is also very striking in his works. We also think about all of his orations.

Suite No. 6 is solar, the crowning. Originally written for a 5-string instrument - there should have been a supplementary string, but we, modern cellists, have to praise ourselves for playing it on a 4-string instrument - is the longest suite. Moreover, it has a very slow allemande but is simultaneously divine. This expansion and all of this thematic development over the course of the 6 suites brings us a crowning and a culmination, effectively, a joy to play. What can I say, this suite is truly a challenge, clearly, and instrumentally speaking, especially when you have to play it at the end of an already extremely long and taxing recital.

In the end, to play all of these suites at a concert is an endurance test, but it’s always a joy to reach the marathon’s finish line.

I would like to put myself in the shoes of someone who is listening to these suites for the first time in their life - hearing them on the radio or maybe purchasing the disk - and I hear a person playing the cello. I would like to tell them what this journey really means, because to perform these suites entirely is, in actuality, a lifetime of work, is to become someone else not just as a performer, technically speaking - because we should probably rather figure out what it means to play on a single instrument music that was thought out on polyphonic lines, therefore for multiple instruments - and then, in the end, I believe it is also a spiritual change. Were you the same after doing this?

I have most certainly changed. I don’t necessarily want to say that I, as a performing artist, had a revelation, but over the course of the concert, I felt that the audience was joining me on this journey and was extremely receptive. I know there weren’t only huge music lovers present, but they still paid the utmost attention to this music. And, at the end of the day, my goal wasn’t to gloat about my ability to play all of these suites in one concert but to showcase these masterpieces that have been dedicated to the instrument that I play. And, yes, I felt that it was a spiritual journey and that somehow almost all of us were filled with hope, that hope for humanity - that it can be better, that we can be more understanding with each other, and is also, in a way, an incursion in the search for inner or collective peace.

And a last question. You were facing the public, but if you were to turn back now and I would ask you, after this journey, if you have one question for Johann Sebastian Bach, what would it be?

Hmm… Where is the manuscript?