Too Much Agenda; Not Enough Music

courtesy of Shuman Associates

The latest violinist to release a “Bach++” recording is Vijay Gupta. At the beginning of this month, he released an album entitled When the Violin through Bandcamp with a Web page that supports digital streaming and download and a limited edition compact disc. Unfortunately, it appears that the liner notes are only available through the “physical” release. That same Web page describes Gupta as “a violinist, speaker and citizen-artist dedicated to creating spaces of wholeness through music.” He then describes one of his achievements as follows:

He is the founder of Street Symphony, a community of musicians dedicated to engaging people in reentry and recovery living in LA's Skid Row.

The title composition of the album is a piece for unaccompanied violin by Reena Esmail that is not quite five minutes in duration. I know Esmail primarily through “Rang de Basant,” another relatively short composition that has become part of Sarah Cahill’s repertoire through that pianist’s efforts to present the diversity of efforts by women composers. I discovered that Esmail had prepared two separate sets of program notes, one for Western readers and the other for those from her native India.

Her notes for “When the Violin” were much briefer. She explains that the title is taken from a text attributed to the fourteenth-century Sufi poet and mystic Hafiz. The thematic material is based on the Charukeshi Raga of Hindustani classical music, which, to Western ears, would probably sound like a synthesis of the major and minor modes. The liner notes also include the English translation of Hafiz’ poem “The Gift,” whose first three words are the words of the album title.

The brevity of this music is compelling, since, over the course of a brief duration, Esmail establishes an intriguing dialectic of Eastern and Western influences. Furthermore, the transition to the second track, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s “Lachen verlernt” (laughing unlearned), feels almost like a segue. This is more than a little ironic, since Salonen’s music is unmistakably Western. Indeed, the title is the German translation of one of the poems by Albert Giraud that Arnold Schoenberg set in his Pierrot lunaire suite (which he called a melodrama since the vocal soloist has the opportunity to exercise her acting chops). While there is little sense of Schoenberg’s influence in Salonen’s score, “Lachen verlernt” is structured as a chaconne, possibly reflecting the ways in which Schoenberg drew upon historical sources for some of his twelve-tone compositions. At the same time Salonen was probably reflecting on the structure of one of the best-known movements for solo violin, which concludes Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 partita in D minor.

It should therefore be no surprise that Gupta turns to Bach after completing “Lachen verlernt.” However, rather than providing a platform for Bach’s chaconne, he plays the BWV 1001 solo violin sonata in G minor, which is particularly notable for presenting the polyphony of fugal structure realized by a single violin. Sadly, there is too much of a business-as-usual rhetoric in Gupta’s Bach performance, as if leaping gracefully over all the technical hurdles was all that matters. Indeed, his approach to Bach left me wondering whether Esmail and Salonen also deserved more expressive treatment, a shortcoming that would only be familiar to listeners with more intimate familiarity with their respective compositions. Such a shortcoming might suggest that Gupta is more interested in being a “citizen-artist” than a virtuoso violinist.