For the first in our series of Bach Through Time, distinguished period cellist Christophe Coin begins with the earliest music for solo cello, by 17th century cellist-composer Domenico Gabrielli, and that written just after Bach, by Evaristo Felice D’all Abaco.

He then turns to the darkly introspective second suite in D minor, with its searching, rhapsodic prelude, before taking up the five-string piccolo cello for Bach’s glorious final ‘resurrection’ suite in D major. It’s an instrument whose high overtones literally ‘light up’ the music, producing an effervescing sympathetic resonance, associated in the cantatas with archangels.