ABS Launches Summer Festival with Soloists

Late yesterday afternoon the American Bach Soloists (ABS) launched its annual Summer Festival with a program in which each of the performers took his/her own turns at being a soloist. Much of the program was devoted to concertos for three violins, allowing Artistic Director and Conductor Jeffrey Thomas to give the program the coy title Triples Alley with a clear nod to Oracle Park. The violinists serving as concerto soloists consisted of (in alphabetical order) Jacob Ashworth, Cynthia Keiko Black, Elizabeth Blumenstock, Tatiana Chulochnikova, Tomà Illiev, YuEun Gemma Kim, and David Wilson. However, all the other ensemble parts were also taken by single performers: Ramón Negrón Pérez on viola, William Skeen on cello, and Corey Jamason on harpsichord.

First page of the oldest surviving copy of Pachelbel’s canon and gigue, whose canon theme is written out only once (from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

For the most part the composers constituted the “usual suspects” in ABS programming: Antonio Vivaldi, Georg Philipp Telemann, George Frideric Handel, and (of course) Johann Sebastian Bach. However, there were also single-movement sonatas for three violins by Giovanni Battista Buonamente and Marco Uccellini. These two sonatas were performed as a set by Black, Blumenstock, and Kim, who then concluded the set with the more familiar canon by Johann Pachelbel coupled with its less familiar gigue. That canon is no longer played to death as it was during the Seventies, after Jean-François Paillard unleashed his chamber orchestra version on the world; but it really takes one-to-a-part playing to appreciate the interleavings that unfold as each phrase passes from one solo violin to another.

True to the program title, almost all of the selections featured three solo violinists. The one exception came with the second Vivaldi selection on the program, the B minor concerto for four violins, which is the tenth concerto in his Opus 3 collection entitled L’estro Armonico (the harmonic inspiration). Bach seems to have been quite a fan of Vivaldi’s music; and he liked this particular composition so much that he repurposed it as a concerto for four harpsichords in A minor (BWV 1065). (Back when I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, I had the good fortune to attend a performance of both of these concertos played consecutively, organized by one of the professors in the Music Department.)

Overall, the concert was a stimulating demonstration of how concertos for multiple instruments still allow each of the participating soloists to display his/her own approaches to virtuosity. That virtuosity would also occasionally percolate down to the continuo, allowing Skeen to take the spotlight every now and then. Needless to say, the audience reception was enthusiastic; and it was clear that everyone there was delighted to be in Herbst to experience the return of ABS concert performances.