Bach Cello Suites: Duarte vs Yates

[andrewbassuk]

Hi. I'm about to embark on learning some of the Cello Suites. What are you impressions of the Duarte Transcriptions vs the Yates transcriptions? I've heard that the Yates ones are easier but some people don't like the keys he chooses.
Thanks for your thoughts
Andrew

[alpsman]

Check out-if you can find -the Kojiro Kobune transcriptions. Very interesting regarding fingering, phrasing and additional voices.

[Brian Brock]

it depends on your goals to a certain extent, but I don't think you can go wrong with just playing them as written, transposed. If you transpose up a major 6th, you can play directly from the cello score, pretending it is written in the treble clef, with some strange key markings. The cello's low C becomes the guitar's A. This has some advantages in terms of comparing the guitar tuning to the cello, but it doesn't really use the range of the guitar well. It's easy though... Transposing up a third (C -> E) or second (in drop D) are also interesting.

You can get the midi files off the net, load them into Musescore, mess with it for a while, and have a full set of transposed cello suites. I haven't completely decided which transposition to go with, but have been playing the 1st and 4th this way for a while.

A lot of what's beautiful in the cello suites are the compound melodies or broken polyphony, and it's hard to arrange much without making the implied melodies explicit, and changing the nature of bach's particular vision for this music.

Yates arranges it so as to create works for guitar, and generally succeeds. However, I would learn all the bach lute music, and the violin music (which is much more amenable to arrangement, I think, at least the sonatas), before I had such a need to find more bach guitar music that I would learn the Yates. The cello suites as cello music played on the guitar, however, are wonderful. Yates does have an interesting text on how to turn things into guitar music, which coupled with his scores is very educational.

I have looked at the duarte and bream arrangements a bit and found them to be more conservative than the yates. I love the (Ponce?) Segovia 1st prelude, which somehow is arranged to be even more celloful, to my ears. I don't think it's available anywhere, but I intend to transcribe it sometime...

[Toccata]

I wish Eliot Fisk would issue the ones I've heard him play--although only about 1% of the guitar world could handle them! I saw him play Suite No.3 last night as his solo piece on a concert with clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. Oh man, it was unbelievable. He took inspiration from Bach's transcription of the 5th Cello Suite to lute and added a lot of counterpoint, additional bass lines, ornaments, and filled in chords, but all to a far greater extent than Bach did with the 3rd Lute Suite. Much of it would have kept a skilled duo busy, let alone a solo guitarist! Much of it sounded as if it were originally a keyboard piece. It might not be to all tastes, but with Fisk's astounding technique and deep musical understanding, it worked beautifully. He used a similar approach to the 6th Cello Suite a few years ago at the GFA.
(Fisk haters, please do not spew your venom here.)

From what I recall, Duarte tends to add more notes than does Yates.

[Brian Brock]

the fifth and sixth are the most like the violin sonatas - the fifth in particular is a bit of an outlier, I think, definitely the most suited to arrangement. My impression is that the sixth is practically already a guitar work, but I've only goofed around with it. The fifth is a kind of french style suite, as I understand it, with lots of flowing melodic lines...

Galbraith has a fantastic version of the fourth on his recent album - I believe it's up a sixth, in C. Also Jorge Caballero does jaw-delaminating versions of the 4th, 6th, and 2nd on his Naumberg Recordings albums in a hodge podge of keys.

[andrewbassuk]

Thanks for the feedback. I ordered the Yates transcriptions they were only about $14 on the big online bookseller.
Andrew

[Brian Brock]

here's an example. 3rd beat, Bach has the cello dip down to D. The note is clearly part of the "bass", but also functions as an octave displaced continuation of the melody, as part of an arpeggiated G chord, and even as a simple melodic jump of a 7th. Only the D can evoke all of these at once.

Yates isn't necessarily wrong to arrange it his way. Once you have filled out a bass line, the D is likely to create ambiguity, so using the G instead might be reasonable. Perhaps he should allow the high line to continue up to D instead of down to B, but there are going to be compromises when transforming music this way.

The problem is that for anyone who knows the cello suites, that drop of a seventh causes pleasant invocations of memories and triggers those grand old neurons, regardless of the functional harmony at work. Beyond that, the real joy of the piece is the way that Bach composes through the limitations of the cello to create something unlike anything else - to lose that is to lose the reason for playing these works in the first place.

Another point of interest is in the next measure. Bach suspends the statement of the C, stretching it over the measure, at the same time changing the texture.

Now, if you're adding a bassline, you probably have to do something on the first beat, or risk sounding thin and lost. And it is a resolution to the tonic, so the C is a likely choice. Perhaps some motion in octaves would work, or maybe an A minor feeling. In any event, the presence of a bass note on beat one weakens the feeling of the descending line.

Then, it also loses the E D C descending line found in the third beats of mm 2-4. The is the D I mentioned earlier on the 3rd beat of m3, and a similarly placed E in m2.

These kind of structural motions are all over the cello suites. I actually arranged the whole 4th cello suite, and I'm a little happy with it, but I scrapped it because I felt that the likelihood was that I was not even seeing the most important aspects of the work.

I'm going to take a look at the Duarte again - I love his compositions.

[Brian Brock]

sorry, here's the example. It's the third and fourth measures of the allemande from the first suite, in Yates's very interesting comparison score, with the original cello suite transposed into Yates's key. Sorry about the quality...

And I do appreciate the huge task and great scholarship Yates brought to this task - it's not something easy to pull off and I think any guitarist interested in the cello suites should have it. I bought it right away when I saw it, just for the comparison scores, the 5th and 6th transcriptions, and the analytic appendix.

[Brian Brock]

duarte takes a different approach, leaving the cello lines more or less intact while adding another part entirely. I think he has some very good ideas. It's a bit harder than the Yates though.