It was 1890 and thirteen-year-old Pablo Casals was poking around in a Barcelona second hand store when he came across a tattered volume of J.S. Bach’s six cello suites: works that were practically unknown. He practiced them as etudes for a dozen years before playing them in public. The suites made him famous, just as he made the suites famous. For many years, however, he refused to record them, finally being persuaded to do so in 1936.
We’ll hear the first of these suites — by Pablo Casals — this Sunday, and we will continue with these historical recordings over the next five weeks.