Calidore and Barnatan Bring Clarity to Their Bach

Pianist Inon Barnatan (above) with the members of the Calidore String Quartet: Estelle Choi, Ryan Meehan, Jeffrey Myers, and Jeremy Berry (courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night in Herbst Theatre, San Francisco Performances (SFP) presented the third offering in its Great Artists and Ensembles Series. This involved the SFP debut of the Calidore String Quartet, whose members are violinists Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, violist Jeremy Berry, and cellist Estelle Choi, joined by pianist Inon Barnatan, making his second SFP appearance. The entire program was devoted to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

More specifically, Barnatan played (at the piano) four of Bach’s keyboard concertos: BWV 1052 in D minor, BWV 1058 in G minor, BWV 1055 in A major, and BWV 1056 in F minor. Calidore provided the “orchestral” accompaniment. In addition, they began the program with six of the pieces collected in the BWV 1080 The Art of Fugue, five four-voice fugues and one two-voice canon.

Putting aside any arguments over the assets and/or liabilities of “historical” instruments, the strongest quality to prevail over the entire program was one of clarity. From the very outset of “Contrapunctus I” at the beginning of the evening, it was clear that the Calidore players understood how to sort out foreground and background in Bach’s intricately elaborate webs of counterpoint. Mind you, there is no indication that Bach ever intended the fugues and canons he was writing for performance. More likely, he saw what he was writing as a pedagogical exercise to explore the rich diversity of approaches to imitative counterpoint.

Indeed, Bach was so focused on this exercise that he died while in the middle of writing out “Contrapunctus XIV.” As the program notes by Eric Bromberger observe, his efforts were only published after his death by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, who was also responsible for giving the collection the name we now know, The Art of Fugue. Since the manuscript consisted only of notes on staff paper with no indication of dynamics, tempo, or even instrumentation, the publication was taken, for the most part, as an academic curiosity. It was not performed for the first time as music until 1922.

Taken as a whole, the collection reminds us that fugue is not a structural form like the dance forms one encounters in those compositions of instrumental music that Bach did intend to be played. It is, at best, a strategy guided by a minimum of constraints. Nevertheless, in spite of such loose flexibility, just about anyone familiar with “standard repertoire” will know a fugue when (s)he plays or listens to one.

From that point of view, BWV 1080 is as valuable a resource for listeners as it is for players. One may then conclude that Calidore played their selections in such a way that listener attention was guided in the directions that Bach had intended. Execution became a matter of just the right balance of the distinctiveness of the individual voices and the different techniques through which those distinctive elements may be blended. To borrow a noun from Antonio Vivaldi, BWV 1080 is a study of the cimento (contest) that arises when the sequential and the simultaneous face off against each other. Calidore knew how to turn that cimento into a rich listening experience.

Barnatan’s subsequent appearance for the concertos made that experience all the richer. His light touch provided just the right level of balance with the four quartet instruments. He acknowledged the broader scope of dynamics and the virtues of the damper pedal, bringing a contemporary expressiveness to his interpretation that showed few, if any, signs of compromising the marks that Bach had committed to paper. The flexibility of his dynamic range was then reflected through his give-and-take with Calidore with all five parties advancing through a keen awareness of how to distinguish foreground from background.

As was the case with BWV 1080, Barnatan’s concerto selections made it clear that there was not “cookie-cutter” mechanism behind Bach’s approaches to the concerto genre. Each of the four concertos had its own distinctive qualities and its own rhetorical framework. Indeed, if there was any problem with last night’s performances, it was the risk of serving up too much of a good thing in all of that diversity. Last night was rich in both expressiveness and variety, meaning that, by the conclusion of the final concerto, the attentive mind had been put through a generous round of paces. Such extensive workouts are seldom encountered in the concert hall; but, given their cerebral demands, that may be just as well.