LDV88-9

21 DAVID GRIMAL Are there any pieces in the Sonatas and Partitas that are your particular favourites? Some are more ‘comfortable’ than others, which seem more like intellectual abstractions. The degree of abstraction is sometimes completely crazy! That’s not the case with the Cello Suites, which are much more accessible, both to play and to listen to. At the end of a concert, I don’t perform the big fugues as an encore, although I love to play them at home. I think that the public tends to expect a sarabande or a slow movement, which have either a more dazzling, direct side, or a tenderness, an intimacy that enables me to establish contact with the audience. Here again, the Chaconne is a special case, because despite its size, it remains accessible and sweeps listeners away with its beauty and humanity. At the crossroads between sacred and profane, between the eternal and the everyday . . . For Bach, craftsmanship is sacred. Everyday life, going to the well to fetch water, harvesting vegetables and going to bed at night, all of that is spiritual. I’ve already felt this link between the spiritual and the secular in India. In our time, when religious sentiment often expresses itself in a retrograde and sometimes violent rejection of the world, Bach still explains the universe to us, but he also celebrates what we do not understand. This man was at one with the world, with time.