Antonio Janigro
Westminster XWN 18073 18349-50
It is very fascinating to listen today to Bach’s Suites interpreted by Antonio Janigro, when even we in Croatia (although with a long time lag compared to West Europe) are increasingly leaning on what the English nicely called ‘period informed performances’. At the time when I was being occupied by Janigro’s Bach (1960s), I was not in the least ‘period informed’. At school nobody actually insisted on the purity of style – the sensibility of Romanticism was dominating the performance of works from all ages, often to the extent that it reminded to the moustache of Mona Lisa. Although, one was expected to show a higher degree of seriousness and depth when interpreting Bach, not even he was spared.
At that time, to grow-up on Janingro’s Bach was the most helpful for a young cellist in shaping his good taste. Performances by the great master will not reveal the characteristic light and somewhat dance-like articulation. This was the time when mostly slower tempo was used when performing Baroque music, especially in the saraband, which would sound like an elegy; also, legato strokes were more frequently used, which today seem somewhat “oily”. Neither Janigro nor the majority of his contemporaries used scordatura in the Suite No. 5, so that the typical timbre of the flattened A string slips away, and accords often have to be adjusted to the capability of the standard tuned instrument. Despite of all that, his performance emanates artistic honesty and nobility – this Janigro’s trademark is omnipresent even in his Bach. Plasticity of the linear polyphony is commendable, leading of voices is perfectly clear, the architecture of the work perfectly laid out, let alone the flawless intonation and beautiful cultivated tone. This ease and virtuosity are particularly pronounced in the Suite No. 6, where the cellists, playing on contemporary instruments, face a special challenge because of the missing E string, typical of discant (the suite was composed for five-stringed cello).
Today’s listener have no other choice but to admire and esteem Janigro’s playing and to push aside any thoughts of orthodoxy of style, all the more given the fact that the recordings were made in mid 1950s. Every age brings its own way of interpretation, but what is important is that Janigro most certainly belongs to a small number of the exceptional and great artists who, at their time, knew the better way of introducing Bach to the general audience, long before the emergence of the period-informed trend in Baroque music.
Valter Dešpalj