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Week of 23 January 1998 Vol. I, No. 17 Arts All alone -- with Bach By Michael Reynolds I recently handed my newly released recording of the complete Bach suites for solo cello to a cellist friend. His first comment was, "Well, you can die now." I suppose that this can be taken variously, depending on the labyrinthian dance between the subtleties of listeners' opinions and performers' insecurities. One of the first discoveries I made during this recording effort was the realization of just how soft my underbelly was. (Hara-kiri was a considered option at several junctures during the editing process.) The $10 million question hangs: what compulsion led me to ride the bleeding edge of self-exposure? The Muir Quartet has been my home base as a performer for two decades. Being in a quartet is vastly different from an orchestral position; one becomes accustomed to a certain ambiguity between collaboration and exposure. As the cellist of a small ensemble, I take turns between creating a solid foundation for the musical dance above me and the fairly frequent exposition of a solo line. On the other hand, Bach is the definition of aloneness. Accompaniment is not an option; once on stage or in front of a microphone, what you see is what you get. Performance, let alone digital permanence, can seem an unnecessary risk of public autopsy of one's weaknesses. When I was a child, my mother and father introduced me to the recording of the Bach suites by the great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals. I discovered it when I was about 10 and listened to it incessantly as I grew up. Home was Bozeman, Montana, a small town in the northern Rockies, so live performances of these works were, well, nonexistent. I would curl up in a corner on cold winter nights, close my eyes, and allow Casals' inimitable interpretation to wash over me. I first performed Bach when I was 12 and early on made it an essential part of my practice ritual. Michael Reynolds In Bach there are no external distractions; one draws inward to a point of existential clarity. It is a meditation. The eyes close; a moment of preparatory silence; the music begins. Memory, both mental and muscle, takes over the mechanical process of performing. Three forms of basic dialogue emerge: lyrical, harmonic, and rhythmic. In these are the seeds of interpretation. Depending on the musical character of each movement, each aspect comes to the fore or retreats to a supporting role. One attempts a continuous connection with the voice; answers emerge about dynamics, harmonic tension and release, the architecture of the line, rhythmic backbone. There is an unending struggle between the emotional and the intellectual; the structural and stylistic needs are sometimes at war with the desire to sing. My tendency? I'm a born romantic. If it don't sing, it don't mean a thing. From my infancy, I heard my mother playing and teaching violin. She was a beautiful, lyrical player, very much in the tradition of Fritz Kreisler, the great Viennese violinist from the first part of this century. Her style sank in; to this day I can't abide playing that lacks a connection to the voice. As a teacher, I find that one of the most difficult issues facing my students is developing the ability to really sing a musical line with full feeling, using the voice as a guide toward interpretation. It can be embarrassing; my vocal quality has gone downhill considerably since the days of my sweet youthful sopr