With my cello students, there comes a moment when we’ve built a solid base of technique and we’re ready to start talking about putting emotional content into a performance.  If I do my job right, I’ve been modeling that all along.   But there’s a specific moment where we’re ready to start thinking about it verbally and deliberately.

When that happens, one of the first things I reach for is my stack of recorded Bach solo cello Suites.  They’re remarkable pieces, six of them, generally getting more difficult to play as you go along, and each movement a sort of world unto itself.  Most (all?) cellists develop a lifelong love affair with these pieces.

As such, there are myriad recordings of the Suites — a treasure trove for any cellist with an iPod or a CD player.  You can listen to them historically, starting with Pablo Casals’s gruff romanticism, moving to more recent flirtations with period performance — or, maybe hip today, a sort of transparent vocalism.

With Casals, you have to imagine the richness of his tone — the old recordings don’t quite capture it — but you can hear the sweep and drama in how he shapes phrases.  It must have been breathtaking to hear the master perform live.  Then you can proceed through Harrell and Ma (listen to Yo-Yo Ma’s old recording, then his newer one; the difference is incredible, and it teaches even my young students lessons that you can’t put into words about age and wisdom).

Or, if you’re a teacher, you might present the recordings topically.  I start off with two polar opposites.

First, Lynn Harrell is the master of the macrophrase.  He might start a movement softly, then gradually, precisely crescendo to a climactic moment, dozens of measures later; just as carefully, he backs away, ending as gently as he began.  It’s a landscape-scale vision of the suites, and of how to shape a phrase in the grand Romantic tradition.  There’s no clearer example of how music theory corresponds to plot arcs in literature.

Then I put in Anner Bylsma’s recording: the opposite, the master of the microphrase, on a baroque cello.  Bylsma captures tiny currents of emotion, changing his articulations and dynamics to stir drama even within individual notes.  Bach’s complexity more than supports this, and I, with my students, listen to these recordings with a fascinated rapture.

Lastly, I play Yo-Yo Ma’s more recent recording, which he made as the soundtrack for a series of short films on PBS.  For me, this recording captures the best of Harrell and Bylsma, adding a special polish from Ma’s masterful, effortless technique.

There are other wonderful recordings, of course, with their own gems.  Rostropovich has breathtaking moments — I think of the organlike chords at the end of the 2nd Prelude.  (Other cellists don’t dare the attempt and cheat with arpeggios.)  I haven’t yet heard Isserlis — forgive me! — but I hear wonderful things.  “Buy as many as you can,” I tell my students.

It’s a great moment to reach — one of the moments that makes teachers love what they do.  With these recordings — gifts from the masters, now over a couple of generations — I can start asking my students to think deliberately about how they shape phrases, where they find tension or peace in a phrase of music, and how they’re going to pass these same gifts on to their own audiences.