Bach Takes a Beating from New Century

Last night in Herbst Theatre the New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO) presented the second San Francisco concert of its 2019–2020 season. An all-string ensemble was led from the piano keyboard by Simone Dinnerstein, marking the beginning of her tenure as artist-in-residence. The program consisted of four concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach and a solo performance of one of Ferruccio Busoni’s arrangements of a Bach organ composition.

The program was organized around three of Bach’s solo keyboard concertos: BWV 1053 in E major, BWV 1056 in F minor, and BWV 1052 in D minor. The fourth concerto was the BWV 1050 “Brandenburg” concerto with solo parts for piano, violin (Robin Mayforth), and flute (Christina Jennings). The Busoni arrangement was a transcription of the BWV 639 organ chorale prelude “Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” (I call on Thee, Lord Jesus Christ), included in Bach’s Orgelbüchlein (little organ book) collection. This made for a promising program, but none of last night’s performances lived up that promise.

It was somewhat ironic that Dinnerstein’s debut visit to NCCO should overlap the return visit of Ton Koopman to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony. Davies Symphony Hall as a massive (some would say cavernous) space. However, one of Koopman’s Bach selections, the BWV 1041 violin concerto in A minor, with SFS Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik as soloist, may well have found its origins in the intimate setting of Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffee house in Leipzig, which hosted weekly concerts by a Collegium Musicum to which Bach belonged and which he sometimes directed. That was most likely the original setting in which Bach himself took the keyboard solos in the three keyboard concertos that Dinnerstein had programmed.

The underlying irony is that the performance in Herbst never rose to the level of intimacy and spontaneity that Koopman evoked in spite of size of the Davies space. Much of that intimacy could be attributed to Koopman working with reduced resources that captured the spirit of Zimmermann’s. Within the transparency of those reduced resources, Barantschik could bring dynamic spontaneity to his solo concerto work, much of which, as I have previously observed, served as a very early instance of the jam session (at least in spirit, if not in flesh).

That spirit totally eluded NCCO last night. Even though the number of string players was significantly reduced, there were still too many of them. As a result, the delicate interplay among the ensemble voices, which made Koopman’s direction of BWV 1041 so exciting, was reduced to little more than an inchoate mush under Dinnerstein’s leadership. At the same time her own keyboard work seemed more focused on fidelity to every last mark on the paper (or tablet, as the case may be), thus lacking any sense of a “groove” that would enable jamming between soloist and ensemble. That lack of spontaneity in spirit also spilled over to the solo contributions of Mayforth and Jennings in BWV 1050. For that matter, Dinnerstein’s solo selection showed little sign of the impact of Bach’s rhetorical approach to the chorale for BWV 639, a sense of expressive substrate that was of primary importance in Busoni’s own performances.

NCCO may have its virtues, but its approach to Bach is not among them.