{TABLE} Cello Suite No 1 ............. Bach Thrinos ...................... John Tavener Cello Suite No 2 ............. Bach Wake up and die .............. John Tavener Cello Suite No 4 ............. Bach {/TABLE} THE great Catalan cellist Pablo Casals discovered the Bach cello suites when he was 13, in a bundle of music in an old shop. His teachers had never even mentioned the pieces to him.

Then, 12 years later, he finally played one in public he was, he says, the first person to dare to play a whole suite rather than just a single movement of what was then - less than 100 years ago - regarded as music of academic interest, without warmth.

In the years since Casals brought the full glory of these suites to wide attention, many performers have opted to handle the pieces with a grandiloquence which has itself, in turn, become an interpretative norm to react against.

And in Steven Isserlis, the music has now found an interpreter who eschews all the familiar exaggerations of rubato and emotional rhetoric without ever treading remotely near the practices of what musicians call "sewing machine Bach."

Isserlis's Bach is both rhythmically fluid and exact and so well sprung you can rarely forget that most of the cello suites movements have their origin in dance. And the dance is a graceful one.

The shaping may be delicate, but it is firm, and yet the phrasing is carried through with a flexibility which, without strain, embraces a multiplicity of implications.

The miracle of the whole presentation is that it comes across less as a public statement radiating out from the performer than as a curiously mystical phenomenon which draws the listener in to share his raptness.

As Isserlis plays these suites, one cannot help but feel, with Casals, "they are the very essence of Bach, and Bach is the essence of music".

Isserlis interleaved the three Bach suites of his RDS recital with music by John Tavener, as he did in his solo recital at Kilkenny Arts Week last year.

On this occasion he added to Thrinos a new piece, Wake up and die, inspired by, of all things, the distant sounds of a Jewish wedding.

The pieces by Tavener, more than any other music which comes readily to mind, have, in spite of a certain blandness, the singular virtue of managing to leave the mood of the Bach intact.