This morning saw the release of the second of the eight videos in the Midweek Melodies series of performances by guitarist Giulio Tampalini released by OMNI on-Location, as curated by the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts. To complement last week’s twentieth-century account of music by Joaquín Rodrigo, today presented a “Back to Bach” release. The selection was the final movement (Allegro) from the BWV 998 Prelude, fugue, and allegro in E-flat major, originally composed for lute by Johann Sebastian Bach around the middle of the eighteenth century.
Like many of the compositions from that period, this was a “binary form” movement in which the second half provides a “reflection” on the first. What was particularly important was Tampalini’s command of the individual strings of the instrument to provide a clear account of the distinction between foreground and background. As is the case with many of Bach’s binary-form compositions, the second part of the structure takes the “melody theme” of the first part and inverts the interval (turning the theme itself upside-down, so to speak). This technique recurs frequently in the composer’s keyboard and chamber music, so there is no surprise in encountering it among the lute compositions.
Screen shot of the finger-work in Tampalini’s performance of Bach’s polyphony (from the second Midweek Melodies video)
Once again, the camera work of Daniel Lama facilitated the viewer appreciating the intricate interplay between fingerwork and thematic structure.
No comments:
Post a Comment