Ronan Kernoa: Bach: The Cello Suites on Six Different Instruments

The Strad Issue: November 2025

Description: An original take on these much-recorded suites pays dividends

Musicians: Ronan Kernoa (cello)

Works: Bach: The Cello Suites on Six Different Instruments

Catalogue number: RAMÉE RAM2404 (2CDs)

Ronan Kernoa earns his place in a crowded catalogue by interpreting the term ‘violoncello’ flexibly and performing each suite on a different type of instrument. His use of treble viol (no.1) and six-string bass viol (no.4) requires transposed versions of Bach’s text (a perfect eleventh higher for no.1). He tinkers with pitch issues, too, tuning no.6’s five-string violoncello piccolo a tone higher than his adopted standard (c.400Hz) for the other instruments. 

Kernoa’s introduction of lute-like pizzicato in the repeated sections of no.4’s Sarabande and Bourrées is another distinctive feature – not one for the purist, but effective nonetheless! The wide range of instrumental timbres captured in this close, warmly resonant recording ensures that his accounts differ markedly from their competition.

Kernoa is an accomplished executant on all six instruments, his interpretations suggesting much careful preparation and experimentation with period bows. His tempos are largely cautious (sample the gigues of nos.4 and 6) but pliant, judicious rubato usage winningly reflecting the rhetorical diversity of the preludes. He negotiates multiple stopping adeptly and with due care for voicing, as in no.6’s sarabande and the fugal section of no.5’s Prelude.

His light, articulated bowing gives agility to most of the courantes and gigues and many of the galanteries, particularly the gavottes of no.5. Allemandes are consistently well shaped and sarabandes are mostly profound and reflective, though no.1’s loses some of its nobility in this revised instrumentation/transposition and no.2’s seems ponderously realised.

Extempore ornamentation is introduced, if somewhat unusually and sparingly, and occasional links into repeated sections are mostly persuasive.

ROBIN STOWELL