Almost exactly two years ago, American Bach Soloists (ABS) launched a new offering in the performances presented by the annual summer Festival & Academy. That offering was a miniseries embedded in the concert schedule entitled Bach Explorations. It consisted of two programs given on consecutive evenings with the titles Bach to Bluegrass & Beyond and Bach Re-Imagined.
Last night Bach Explorations returned to this month’s Summer Festival, and the title of the program was Transformation. The program was based on three selections of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach coupled with “transformations” of that music by composers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To be fair, this approach has predecessors, one of which took place in last night’s venue, Herbst Theatre. In March of 2010 violinist Jennifer Koh took a similar approach in the program she had prepared for San Francisco Performances. That approach, in turn, led to a series of three Bach & Beyond albums based on recording sessions that began in November of 2011.
Koh’s point of departure was revisited during the first half of last night’s program. It involved how the first movement (given the title “Obsession: Prelude”) of Eugène Ysaÿe’s Opus 27 (second) solo violin sonata begins with a direct quotation of the opening measures of Bach’s BWV 1006 solo violin partita in E major, after which it then contends with quotations of the opening phrase of the “Dies irae” sequence from thirteenth-century plainchant. Last night the “revisiting” involved two violinists. Rachell Ellen Wong gave a dynamite account of the Prelude movement of BWV 1006, while Ysaÿe’s “transformation” was performed by Noah Strick.
However, BWV 1006 was subjected to further transformations. After Wong performed the Prelude movement, she continued with two additional movements from the partita, the Gavotte en rondeau and the concluding Gigue. These were selected because Sergei Rachmaninoff arranged all three of these movements for solo piano performance. As might be guessed, there was a generous amount of Rachmaninoff rhetoric; but his own devices were well-calculated embellishments, providing a foreground that never obscured the clarity of Bach’s own music in the background.
This arrangement was played last night by pianist Steven Bailey. Unfortunately, his approach to Rachmaninoff was far more disappointing that Strick’s account of Ysaÿe. Basically, Bailey never conveyed the meticulous technique that Rachmaninoff summoned to distinguish foreground from background. As a result, Bailey’s account was little more than a barrage of notes, leaving the listener to sort out the Bach from the Rachmaninoff. The good news is that Rachmaninoff himself recorded his arrangement for RCA Victor, so it is not difficult to find the opportunity to listen to this music in a performance that did justice to the composer-arranger!
Two other Bach selections were “transformed” over the course of last night’s program. The first involved a rather odd approach to arranging the BWV 1007 solo cello suite in G major. Indeed, anticipating Rachmaninoff’s approach to BWV 1006, Bach’s music was left intact; but it was “enhanced” with an added “piano accompaniment” part. That addition was originally composed by Robert Schumann and then refined by Friedrich Wilhelm Stade about a decade after Schumann’s death.
Stade’s arrangement was performed by Kenneth Slowik at the piano accompanying cellist Gretchen Claassen, who played Bach’s music as it had been written. Needless to say, the Bach solo cello suites are now so well known that adding any accompaniment amounts to, as one comedian put it, adding a window to the Taj Mahal. Fortunately, Slowik had the good judgment to keep his playing subdued, allowing listeners to focus on Claassen’s absorbing accounts of all of the movements in Bach’s suite.
The final “transformation” involved the opening chorus and final chorale of the BWV 12 cantata Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (weeping, lamenting, worrying, fearing). The opening movement will be familiar to those that know the BWV 232 setting of the Mass text in B minor, since Bach revisited that music for the “Crucifixus” chorus. These two excepts were given an instrumental account with Corey Jamason playing the vocal parts on organ, after which Bailey returned to the piano to play the set of variations that Liszt composed on the opening chorus, including the chorale as a finale.
This particular Liszt offering is the perfect example of what may have been his favorite motto: “Nothing succeeds like excess.” This is music that sprawls in both space (across the entire keyboard) and time (sounding as if it could go on forever). Bailey can be credited for his endurance over the course of the entire composition, but any awards for endurance should go to the members of the audience that sat still for the performance. If Liszt thought highly of Bach, he had an odd way of showing it.
No comments:
Post a Comment