Last night in the Recital Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the American Bach Soloists wrapped up its two-concert miniseries called Bach Explorations, curated by bassist Daniel Turkos for this summer’s Festival & Academy. The title of the program was Bach Re-Imagined, and it consisted of performances of relatively familiar compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach played on instruments other than those Bach had intended. Indeed, in most of the cases, the instruments involved would have been unknown to Bach and may not even have existed in his day. Nevertheless, some of the most remote departures from conventional instrumentation turned out to provide some of the most absorbing performances on the program.
The best case in point probably involved a performance of the entire BWV 1009 suite for solo cello in C major by baritone saxophonist Andrew Barnhart. However, it is worth dwelling a bit why this idea is less radical than one might suppose. We need to begin by remembering that each of the four strings of a cello has its own unique sonorous qualities involving more than just pitch range. Given that string technology as we now know it originated around 1660 in Bologna, it is reasonable to assume that Bach was well aware of those diverse qualities and would have written his solo suites to explore them.
Similarly, single-reed instruments, such as the clarinet, display different sonorous properties for different pitch ranges, known as “registers.” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was well aware of those differences, and many of his clarinet compositions illustrate how ingeniously he could exploit diversity of sound qualities. Saxophones, which did not appear until after clarinets had been played for some time, exhibit that same property of different registers, each with its own unique sonorities.
Naturally, there is no simple translation from the sonorities of cello strings to the registers of a baritone saxophone. Nevertheless, it was clear last night that Barnhart was as sensitive to shifts in those sonorities as Bach had been. One result was that his execution of BWV 1009 captured most of the polyphonic qualities that Bach would have realized in terms of which string would play which notes. Thus, one thought less about the fact that the sounds were not coming from a cello and more about how Barnhart’s instrument could disclose as much about Bach’s inventive skills as one would encounter at a first-rate cello recital.
To some extent Tim Padgett’s marimba performance also involved the ability of sonority to sort out Bach’s polyphonic voices at their most complex. If nothing else, the resonance qualities of the individual bars are related to size, meaning that the lower pitches tend to reverberate more (and more distinctively) than the higher ones. Padgett’s selection was the concluding chaconne movement from the BWV 1004 D minor partita for solo violin.
As is usually the case, he performed with four mallets. As a result, I toyed with the idea that there might be a correlation between four mallets and four strings; but that speculation did not sustain for very long. More important was yet another example of Bach’s ability to evoke polyphony when writing for an instrument usually taken to have a “single voice.” Listening to Padgett, I found myself thinking less about Bach’s violin version and more about the transcription Johannes Brahms composed for piano played by the left hand alone. It struck me that all of the polyphonic details that Brahms had captured so effectively were being taken into account just as effectively in Padgett’s performance. While there were occasional “speed bumps” in his execution, for the most part the execution positively bubbled with the combined inventive capacities of both Bach and Brahms.
Equally effervescent was the return of Al Mireault with his five-string banjo. Readers may recall that, in last night’s bluegrass set, I regretted not hearing more of Mireault, considering how much of “bluegrass as we know it” involves the banjo technique introduced by Earl Scruggs. Mireault played two Bach transcriptions, both opening Prelude movements. The first was from the BWV 1007 solo cello suite in G major, and the second was from the BWV 1006 solo violin partita in E major. The arrangers for these selections were Wes Corbett and John Bullard, respectively.
Both of these selections displayed impressive dexterity, even if attentiveness to phrasing and sonority was not as compelling as it was in the saxophone and marimba selections. Instead, the performances reflected Pete Seeger’s old Goofing-Off Suite album, in which Seeger explored a wide diversity of tunes to play, none of which had been written with the banjo in mind. Seeger’s approach was as affable as it was inventive; and much of that spirit rose again in Mireault’s performances, which he interleaved with two bluegrass selections, almost as a nod to Seeger’s delight in variety.
The only real weakness in the evening came at the very beginning with the trumpet performance by Jon Manness. His account of the sarabande and gigue movements from the BWV 1008 solo cello suite in D minor never really got around either the melodic line or the polyphony embedded in that line. There also was some evidence that Manness was having problems with breath control.
“Agnus Dei” from BWV 232 (from the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe, from IMSLP, public domain)
Fortunately, matters improved once Manness moved into a combo setting. He played the “Bist du bei mir” entry in the second (1725) notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach (listed in Wolfgang Schmieder’s catalog as BWV 508 and probably composed by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel). For this he was joined by two of last night’s performers, Turkos on bass and Kit Massey on piano. They were then joined by violinist Gail Hernández Rosa for a performance of the “Agnus Dei” movement from the BWV 232 Mass setting in B minor. This music is basically “chamber music” scored for violin, alto voice, and continuo. Manness took the vocal line, and the continuo was shared by Turkos and Massey. Manness seemed to be more comfortable playing with others, and this last selection was almost as moving as in its original version.
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