J.S. Bach Cello Suites Import 5LP Box Set

TAS Super LP List! Special Merit: Classical

These recordings of J.S. Bach's cello suites performed by cellist Justin Pearson and 5 string cellist Pedro Silva took one year to complete, and include Schumann's piano accompaniment for the 3rd suite, performed by pianist Katherine Rockhill.

The deluxe box set contains 5LPs plus "The Cello Suites" paper back book by Eric Siblin and a "Behind the Scenes" 32 page "making of" booklet.

The performance, the sound quality, and the packaging with the lavish book are all extraordinary. It is truly a monumental effort. I look forward to bringing it to the attention of our readers...

Chasing the Dragon recently released an ambitious and meticulously recorded, produced, and packaged five-LP edition of the Bach Cello Suites, most of which is performed by Justin Pearson, principal cellist of the National Symphony Orchestra. It includes two versions of the 3rd suite, one with the piano accompaniment written by Robert Schumann. (Robert Schumann wrote accompaniment for all six, but wife Clara is thought to have destroyed the others; somehow the 3rd survived.) The church recording (to analog tape) in five sessions in two venues, using a pair of omni-directional microphones, is sonically spectacular in its lifelike instrumental timbre and 3D spaciousness.

...the sonics are absolutely superlative, truly reference standard by any measure, notably for transparency and that elusive sense of lifelikeness, tactility, and dimensionality, the microphone placement ideally mediating focus on the instrument while capturing the warm ambience of the settings (two rural churches in England because Covid forced the project into hiatus): Peter Walker's 'window onto the concert hall' achieved to a fare thee well. I've never heard a more beautiful and convincing recording of any instrument and only a tiny handful as good. Processing is likewise excellent, surfaces silent except for the stray pop or tick rearing their unwelcome heads.