Frederick Zlotkin - Bach: Suites For Unaccompanied Cello With Embellished Repeats (2021)

This is a reissue of a 1997 recording of the Bach Cello Suites that received very positive reviews from some corners. One of the interesting things about this recording which makes it different from the wide majority of others is that Zlotkin plays embellishments on all of the theme repeats throughout the six suites.

Prior to my receiving this CD for review I knew nothing about Zlotkin, but apparently he is a busy man. In addition to being the solo cellist for the New York City Ballet Company for more than 30 years, Zlotkin also performs regularly as a soloist with many American orchestras and has a busy career in Hollywood, where he has played on “hundreds” of films. His teachers included Leonard Rose and Gregor Piatagorsky, and he also plays chamber music as a member of the Lyric Piano Quartet. One wonders when he has time to sleep.

Zlotkin has a very handsome cello sound, warm yet tight and compact, closer in texture to Rose (and Feuermann) than to Piatagorsky. He also has a no-nonsense approach to the music, which I greatly appreciated. Not for him the fussy Romanticisms of some European cellists, starting with Casals in 1937; he gets right to the music and plays it in a straightforward manner. His embellishments on the repeats are tasteful and stylistically idiomatic. Between the brisk tempi, the warm sound and the embellishments, he holds your interest far better than many other cellists have done.

Yet I would not necessarily recommend this as a first choice, simply because others have come along since 1997 who have brought a bit more to the table than Zlotkin does here. Yehuda Hanani’s superb recording for Town Hall Records, which is my first choice, is better, but alas is no longer available, but there is also Zuill Bailey’s mesmerizing performance for Telarc, which though not quite as fascinating as Hanani is more colorful than Zlotkin. In addition, we now have Sergey Malov’s colorful and enlivened performances of these works on the shoulder cello, the instrument for which they were written, on Solo Musica, a recording I raved about when it was first released. Hanani, Bailey and Malov all do something with the music that Zlotkin does not, and that is to vary the dynamics in certain phrases, and this gives the music more color as well as greater interest for the listener—and this despite the fact that Malov uses the ahistoric “straight tone” so much in vogue today whereas Zlotkin does not.

If, however, you want a good, lively but dynamically uninflected reading of these suites, Zlotkin is for you. Parnassus is offering this set at a discount price of $12.99, a good buy for a 2-CD album.