ABS Festival’s Evening of Chamber Music++

The title of last night’s Summer Festival program presented by American Bach Soloists (ABS) was The Devil’s Trill. This is the title that Giuseppe Tartini assigned to a violin sonata he composed in the key of G minor. The title was the result of a dream that Tartini related about making a pact with the devil and the devil confronting him with a highly complex trill. The sonata was thus an effort to capture on paper what he had dreamed.

The trill does not show up until the final movement of the sonata, where it provides accompaniment (of a sort) to an elaborate melodic line being fingered at the same time. The idea that this music was the result of supernatural inspiration may seem a bit absurd; but, as the Italians like to say, it still makes a good story. Last night the sonata was performed by Tatiana Chulochnikova with continuo accompaniment provided by Gretchen Claassen on cello and Corey Jamason on piano. Chulochnikova had clearly put considerable effort into mastering all those “diabolic” technical challenges; but she also served up a thoroughly engaging account of the diversity of rhetoric that pervades the sonata’s first three movements. Audiences may only be interested in whether or not the devil will get his due, but the path to that confrontation still has much to offer in a more “virtuous” setting.

Tartini was also represented by a pastorale in A major, the first in a set of six church sonatas included in his Opus 1 collection of concertos and sonatas. This requires scordatura tuning and offers its own set of virtuosic challenges. The soloist for this selection was Jacob Ashworth, also accompanied by Claassen and Jamason.

The pastorale was flanked on either side by trio sonatas by George Frideric Handel and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, respectively. The Handel sonata was the fourth in his Opus 5 collection, composed in the key of G major. Claassen and Jamason accompanied violinists Elizabeth Blumenstock and YuEun Gemma Kim through a non-standard sonata structure with particular attention to dance forms.

The Bach selection, on the other hand, amounted to an amusing specimen of program music involving a “Conversation between a Sanguine and a Melancholy.” Violinist Tomà Iliev took the “Melancholy” part, thwarted at every step by perky interruptions delivered by Rachel Ellen Wong. This “mini-drama” served well as the “curtain raiser” for Tartini’s diabolic sonata.

The program concluded with music by Bach’s father, Johann Sebastian. This was the first “all hands” performance of the Festival with more than one-to-a-part playing of the ripieno parts for first and second violins and viola. (Admittedly, violist Ramón Negrón Pérez shared his stand with Ashworth playing the same part on violin.) The soloists were Iliev and Tekla Cunningham. Both the rich “orchestral” sonorities and the deft account of the solo parts provided the perfect conclusion to an engaging evening of imaginative chamber music for strings.