The booklet note expends ink on the historical justifications for playing Bach’s Cello Suites on the viola da gamba, but in the end Myriam Rignol – a member of several of France’s most distinguished period orchestras, here making her first solo recording – reveals that she simply wants to feel the freedom of playing them on her own instrument. And that’s reason enough, isn’t it? Rachel Podger (violin), Tabea Zimmermann (viola) and Marion Verbruggen (recorder) are among several others to have done the same, successfully, and with no apologies.

The results are of course largely affected by the instruments themselves: the cello louder, more boldly projected and capable of an intense, warm lyricism; the gamba softer, wirier and perhaps less able to sing freely but with its own resonant glow, a relaxed grace in multiple-stops and broken-chord figures that makes them easier to assume into the line, and an air of intimacy that few other Baroque instruments can match.

Although she does not alter the actual music much, Rignol’s performances benefit from the gamba’s silvery lightness of sound, running easily over the notes in the more mellifluous Preludes, the Second Courante and the Fourth Gigue, setting a satisfying lilt in the Fifth Courante and keeping the bass notes of the Second Gigue under control. At its best it has a winning, almost porcelain-like delicacy (First Bourrée) and makes effective use (often in the Courantes) of the gamba’s ability to gently point the fulcrum of a phrase like a dancer’s fleeting change of balance. Rignol says she wants to find the dance element in this music most of all, and in moments such as these she succeeds through subtle articulation and give-and-take rubato. Strange, then, that some of the Allemandes and Sarabandes seem too slow and rigid to dance to at all.

Rignol’s Bach is thus a mixed pleasure, though it does give a comforting impression of someone quietly and honestly following her own way. In many respects, however, her interpretations are maybe not all that different from how someone might have played them on a cello, and in that regard they make an interesting comparison with Paolo Pandolfo’s 20-year-old recording (Glossa, 10/01), which, with its Marais-like flourishes, extra chords and dramatic flair, really hoiks Bach’s Suites to the viola da gamba world.