Alon Sariel makes his Pentatone label debut with Plucked Bach, a program exploring Bach’s cello suites performed on mandolins, lutes, baroque guitar, and oud, concluding with Sariel’s own Bach-inspired Mandolin Partita. Bach’s suites are often considered to be “the cellist’s Bible,” but the transferability of his music between instruments – a practice to which the composer himself also contributed frequently – seems to justify this fresh approach. Sariel aims to realize the timeless and universal character of Bach’s music in a multifarious sound world of plucked instruments, through a program that employs an interplay of light and dark, embodied by the first and second suites respectively.