Renowned Cellist Zuill Bailey to Play Bach Cello Suites - All of Them! - September 18th at Grant Hall

The 2010 Sitka Music Festival's Autumn Classics concert series will kick off with one performance at Alaska Pacific University's Grant Hall, on September 18th, at 7:00 p.m. The concert will start an hour early because it will be an incredibly rich evening, devoted to performances of all six of Johann Sebastian Bach's Suites for Solo Cello. The performer, Zuill Bailey, has just completed recording the entire set of suites for Telarc.

If you are interested in going to this performance, you might want to get hold of the Sitka Festival soon, because it will sell out.

Bailey, who is the incoming artistic director for the Sitka festival organization, plays the 1693 Matteo Gofriller Cello (created when J.S. Bach was eight years old), formerly owned by Mischa Schneider of the Budapest String Quartet.

Here's a description of the suites as a set, from the Wikipedia article about them:

The suites contain a great variety of technical devices, a wide emotional range, and some of Bach's most compelling voice interactions and conversations. It is their intimacy, however, that has made the suites amongst Bach's most popular works today, resulting in their different recorded interpretations being fiercely defended by their respective advocates.

And here is Zuill Bailey playing excerpts from them, and describing their importance, from the documentary, BACH & friends:


Here's how Bailey will open the program: