In a long-ago “Young People’s Concert” on TV, Leonard
Bernstein took as his theme the idea of “Bach Transmogrified.” To his audience
of captive tykes, he presented numerous examples of the sturdy old baroque
master’s sturdy old music re-arranged not only for symphony orchestras, but
also for such then-up-to-date phenomena as a rock band and a Moog synthesizer
(I told you it was long ago).
Bernstein’s point, if I understood it at age 12, was that
Bach’s work was a kind of super-music, so ingeniously and flawlessly put
together that it was capable of surviving any kind of handling, whether
respectful or rough. To put it another way: Bach’s music sounds great played by
just about any instrument or arrangement of instruments.
“Bach to the Future,” Sunday’s Society for Chamber Music’s concert
at Hochstein Performance Hall, made much the same point, though strictly with
regular instruments and highly respectful handling. This diverting program
presented some familiar music by Bach, and a few Bachian
inspirations — starting with several examples of remarkable imitation-Bach for
violin and piano by a 10-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, sturdily played by Juliana
Athayde.
In arranging Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” for string trio,
the violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky paid homage to a
great piece of music and to a great, if very idiosyncratic, performance of it:
Glenn Gould’s 1981 re-recording of the “Goldbergs,”
with its often glacial tempi and general otherworldly air. Arranging this
quintessentially “keyboard” work for violin, viola, and cello may seem like a
quixotic endeavor, but it works. Sitkovetsky turns
idiomatic keyboard writing into idiomatic string writing while sounding convincingly
Bachian. Athayde, violist
Marc Anderson, and cellist Benjamin Krug presented about half of the 30
variations that make up the piece, beginning and ending with that becalmed
“Aria.”
Whatever its oddities, Gould’s recording was a moving musical
journey, and so was this, performed with an admirable plainness and directness
of expression. I would love to hear this trio play the entire thing.
The remainder of the program offered Bach refracted through
several different composing sensibilities. Mozart discovered Bach about midway
through his career, and paid homage in arranging several of the fugues from the
“Well-Tempered Clavier” for string quartet. Violinist Shannon Nance joined Athayde, Anderson, and Krug for five of these,
demonstrating the clarity that individual instruments can bring to complex
contrapuntal writing.
Charles Gounod, the composer of “Faust,” took a simple
approach to arranging Bach, superimposing a sweet (if not saccharine) melody
over the composer’s first prelude from the “WTC” to create the famous “Ave
Maria.” This was appealingly performed by Nance with pianist Chiao-Wen Cheng, who got a flashy solo opportunity in Rachmaninoff’s
arrangement of another Bach prelude, from the Third Violin Partita.
Rachmaninoff, not surprisingly, rethought this single line of violin writing in
thoroughly piano-virtuoso terms. The result, including some un-Bachian harmonies, sounds almost like an outtake from his
“Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.”
All this was unexpectedly balanced by three movements from Claude
Bolling’s “Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano,” a 1973
piece written for Jean-Pierre Rampal that was a
bestseller on records and ubiquitous on classical radio and TV commercials 40
years or so ago. Its success spawned numerous, similar suites by Bolling for jazz trio with classical celebs playing
trumpet, violin, cello, and so on. This suite is the prototype: featherweight,
but cleverly written, tuneful, and quite a workout for the flutist, in this
case the RPO’s Rebecca Gilbert, supported by Cheng, bassist Jeff Campbell, and
drummer Dave Mancini.
Bolling copies some baroque dance
types and harmonic progressions, and he even winds the piece up with a lively
jazz fugue, but his music is closer to the good-natured, high-class background
music of Telemann than to anything by Bach. As in much “classical jazz,” like
the concert works of Gershwin, there can be quite a bit of filler between the
good tunes, but this performance — if not well-tempered, certainly good-tempered
— entertainingly wrapped up an interesting program.
This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2017.
