Sentimental Work: François Rabbath

When I started playing the double bass, I was always frustrated that there was so little classical repertoire written for it. I even began to compose some pieces myself, but I knew there must be some other way to find music to play. When I was around 17 I heard Pablo Casals playing the Prelude from Bach’s First Cello Suite on the radio, and I was overcome. It was the first time I’d heard the piece and it immediately gave me goosebumps – it was possibly the most moving performance I’d heard up until then. My first question was: why can’t we play this on the bass? A cellist friend of mine pointed out that Édouard Nanny had written some transcriptions for the bass in the 1920s, but I said I wanted to play them the way I’d heard Casals – in the same octave. ‘That’s crazy,’ he laughed. ‘It’s like jumping off the building and hoping you’ll land safely!’ He even bet his cello that I could never play the First Suite in its entirety. Well, to me that meant it would take time, so I started with the Prelude…