Album: Bach: Cello Suites
Artist: Anastasia Kobekina
Label: Sony Classical
Release date: 26 September 2025
Recorded: Théâtre Saint-Bonnet, Bourges (France), January 2025
Instruments: Two Stradivari cellos (1698, 1717) · Violoncello piccolo (c. 1800) · Baroque bows · Gut strings
Available on all streaming platforms
By Damián Autorino
Editor at Moto Perpetuo
For any cellist, Bach’s Six Suites are the emblematic summit — a lifelong companion, a technical and artistic rite of passage, and a place where tradition and individuality collide. To record the complete cycle is to enter a lineage that stretches from Pablo Casals to János Starker, Mstislav Rostropovich, Yo-Yo Ma, Steven Isserlis, Jean-Guihen Queyras and many others. It is also a question: why add another recording to such a long and formidable history?
For Anastasia Kobekina, the answer is twofold. In her conversation with Martin Cullingford for the Gramophone podcast, she is disarmingly clear: these suites are “a shared space for interpretation — mine and yours”, a music that changes with “who or what I am at that very point in time”. She rejects the notion of a definitive version; each performance is “a photograph of a moment”.
The deeper answer, however, lies in the playing. Kobekina approaches Bach with a voice that is personal yet restrained, elegant without affectation, and grounded in years of immersion in Baroque cello. She performs on gut strings, uses Baroque bows, and abandons the modern endpin, embracing a closer physical relationship with the instrument. Her violoncello piccolo for the Sixth Suite adds another layer of colour, allowing the music to breathe with a lighter, more resonant palette.
This historically informed setup is not an aesthetic gesture but a foundation for her articulation, phrasing and sense of time. As she tells Gramophone, gut strings demand patience: “they need time to resonate”, shaping the flow of each line and encouraging a deeper attention to gravity, movement and silence.
Kobekina’s recording sessions took place over a week of intensive work in a small hall in Bourges, mostly at night — a setting she describes as opening a “mysterious” concentration. The result feels exactly like that: intimate, inward, finely contoured. She does not try to compete with the monumental readings of the past; instead, she offers a perspective that is curious, sincere and quietly confident, trusting the suites’ capacity to reveal something new each time.
At the beginning of her career, Kobekina takes on one of classical music’s most exposed challenges — and does so with the freshness of an artist who has something to say. This recording is not about arriving at Bach; it is about beginning a long conversation with him.
Subscribe to our newsletter