here's a snapshot of a highly gifted musician in the midst of an exploratory process…he's gone back to Anna Magdalena's copy, finding a variant of the opening material in the D major Prelude which adds a piquant suspension to the pattern. Higham has also absorbed its asymmetric implied bowings, bringing a fascinating, fluid tension to the G major Prelude, in particular.

I reckon Higham could just have been handed a twig from a tree and he would have made beautiful music! … I will be impressed if he can better these renditions.

Higham plays his usual warm and fulsome Testore for Suites Nos. 1 to 5 but swaps to a clean and crisp modern five-string Roth cello for the filigree Sixth Suite. It is hard to imagine how Higham could have done better than choose these very different instruments to elicit the combinations of tone and colour that he is able to achieve across the Suites.

What’s most impressive about these compelling readings is that Higham avoids the romanticist’s self-indulgently furrowed brow without sacrificing intensity.

There’s a beautifully meditative quality to these performances of Bach’s solo cello Suites by Philip Higham that is both soothing and questioning … the entire set displays a seamless flow of invention that takes us from the pragmatic virtuosity of the 1st to the heart-tugging emotion of the 6th as if on a life’s journey. Higham’s use of a 5-string instrument in the latter endows the finale of this 2-CD set with a prophetic, luminescent glow

The character he finds throughout this music is consistently revealing...unpretentious depths and organic, naturalistic flow: the highest possile recommendation.