PBO Announces Salon Series Concert

At the end of last month, eight of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra musicians returned to the stage of Herbst Theatre to record a program entitled Bach: The Unanswered Question. The title probably refers to the fact that the program, curated by Music Director Richard Egarr, will include the unfinished “Contrapunctus XIV” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1080 The Art of Fugue. (Readers may recall that Ferruccio Busoni prepared his own rather extensive completion of this movement for his “Fantasia contrappuntistica,” whose performance by Garrick Ohlsson and Kirill Gerstein was streamed by the Shriver Hall Concert Series last week.) This four-voice fugue will most likely be performed by the string quartet of violinists Elizabeth Blumenstock and Carla Moore, violist Katherine Kyme, and cellist William Skeen.

This performance will be preceded by BWV 1087, an appendix in Bach’s personal copy of the printed edition of the BWV 988 set of “Goldberg” variations. This appendix consisted of fourteen canons based on the first eight notes in the bass line of the theme that begins BWV 988:

Figured bass numbers from Ralph Kirkpatrick’s edition of BWV 988, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain

There is some speculation that the number of canons had to do with Bach’s “computation” based on adding the corresponding numerical values of the letters of his name: B (2) + A (1) + C (3) + H (8) = 14! These canons will be presented by the aforementioned string players, performing an arrangement prepared by Egarr.

For the final selection those string players will be joined by Kristin Zoernig on bass and Katherine Heater on harpsichord. The ensemble will perform the BWV 1070 orchestral suite in G minor. While this composition was included in the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis catalog, it is almost certainly not composed by Bach. More likely the composer was Bach’s eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann.

As of this writing, a “trailer” has been uploaded to YouTube. The duration is only 38 seconds, and it appears to consist of an excerpt from BWV 1070. The complete video will be available for streaming at 8 p.m. this coming Tuesday, November 24. Most likely it will be found on the YouTube PBO home page. However, this article will be updated when more specific information is available.