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JS Bach: Prelude in G major from Cello Suite 1 BWV 1007

from Echoes Of Bach by Mike Block

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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    A word from Mike:
    The music on this album has meant different things to me at different times of my life. In one sense, it is all music that is intimately familiar - the music I grew up playing in a family of classical musicians. Contrastingly, it is also the repertoire I deliberately left behind as a young professional to explore other styles and musical experiences. When I play this music now, it feels like returning back to my childhood home, but as an adult. I know what is around every corner, and have countless memories associated with each bar, yet at the same time, I’m taller now, and everything looks different from this angle.

    The origin of this album can to be can be traced to a soundcheck with the Silkroad Ensemble. Yo-Yo Ma, our founder, often plays the Allemande from Bach’s Suite No. 2 to test his microphone. We are usually situated next to each other onstage, so I often check my microphone immediately after him. In a moment of mischievousness, I decided to test my microphone with the same movement of Bach, to see if I could get a laugh out of the ensemble. Later in the soundcheck, Yo-Yo leaned over and whispered, “You should play more Bach!” He knew it had been years since I performed Bach, and went on to say that it would be valuable to return to the music I knew most intimately, in order to have something deep to share from stage. Needless to say, I listened to him, and began to explore Bach again in my practice sessions. I would often wander around my apartment while practicing it, with the aid of the Block Strap, and repeatedly found myself playing Bach in the bathroom, where the acoustic are so great. I eventually started performing Bach in my solo shows, and found it incredibly satisfying to phrase them in different ways each night. I consistently programmed them as a moment of elegance in a set otherwise filled with groovy original songs and folk music of various kinds. I also started adding in some 20th-Century pieces for contrast, to show the full range of what can be considered “classical”, and draw on the contemporary music that defined much of my college years. For this album, I’ve included the first movement from the Ligeti Sonata for Solo Cello, a movement from Ahmed Adnan Saygun's Partita and, finally, the world premiere recording of Citarruni, from the Taranta Project, by Giovanni Sollima (Commissioned by Silkroad). The music on this album is the result of my journey, and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I do playing!

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from Echoes Of Bach, released November 9, 2018

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Mike Block Boston, Massachusetts

MIKE BLOCK is a Grammy-Award winning multi-style cellist, singer, composer, and educator, hailed by Yo-Yo Ma as the "ideal musician of the 21st-Century", and acclaimed by the NYTimes for his "vital rich-hued solo playing".

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