Brave new takes on Bach
At the festival devoted to the baroque composer, cellist Matt Haimovitz prefaces each piece with a new work
For centuries the Veil of Veronica was one of the key icons of the Catholic Church. A cloth purportedly used to wipe the sweat and blood from Jesus’s face during his final walk through Jerusalem, it showed the face of a bearded man somehow—miraculously, the pious might claim— imprinted on its surface.
Alas, the Veil is now lost to history; neither DNA testing nor other forms of forensic analysis will unlock its secrets. But its underlying metaphor—the enduring presence of the sacred in the material world—remains potent, as can be heard in composer Du Yun’s The Veronica. One of four short “overtures” that Matt Haimovitz will play alongside his Vancouver Bach Festival renditions of Johann Sebastian Bach’s first, second, third, and fifth suites for cello, it reveals Bach’s hand within the fabric of a 21st-century score from a young, Shanghai-born composer.
“You have this sort of timbral veil that runs through it, and these [Bach-derived] images and musical fragments sort of pop out of this veil,” Haimovitz says, in a telephone interview from rural Massachusetts. Philip Glass, David Sanford, and Vijay Iyer are the other living composers we’ll hear from during Haimovitz’s two Bach Festival concerts. Each was assigned a different suite to preface with a new composition, but all were given the same open-ended instructions: to reference Bach, somehow, within their own very different musical languages. The resulting works, Haimovitz says, illuminate different aspects of Bach while stretching his instrumental powers—powers that he’s honed by recording two very different interpretations of the Cello Suites, one on a contemporary instrument in 2000, and another on baroque and piccolo cellos in 2015. Sanford’s Es War, Haimovitz says, calls on him to summon up his inner Charles Mingus thanks to its jazzy, pizzicato first movement. Iyer’s appropriately titled Run requires such breakneck virtuosity that the cellist initially thought it would be impossible to perform. “I’d never seen anything like it,” he says of the Indo-american composer and improvising pianist’s complex score. “I kind of gave it a chance over three days, and really, it wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t sounding any better. And then finally I started to make it my own, adding articulation and dynamics—and it started to take on a life of its own.” Pioneering minimalist Glass’s Overture to Bach, in contrast, hews close to Johann Sebastian’s early-18th-century language. “If you didn’t know it was Philip Glass, you almost would think ‘Okay, Bach wrote a little short piece for cello,’” Haimovitz notes. “He sticks with the range that Bach was using—two octaves plus a fifth—and really treats the polyphony in the same way. But that’s the way he’s writing now; he’s so deeply influenced by Bach that that is his language.”
And The Veronica, he adds, is very much a reflection of its composer’s personality. “She has such a vivid imagination, and so much drama in her music!” Haimovitz says of Du Yun, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in April. “And she’s so influenced by such a wide
variety of vernaculars from all over the place. She’s travelling all the time, and absorbing all kinds of cultures.”
Counting the two pieces that we won’t get to hear in Vancouver, by Luna Pearl Woolf and Roberto Sierra, Haimovitz’s six commissions touch on elements of salsa, Hawaiian ritual music, and Serbian chant, in addition to minimalism, jazz, and free improvisation. But Bach, the cellist says definitively, is big enough to embrace them all.
“Bach was using whatever he had at his disposal—whatever musical vernaculars and ideas that he had around him, and those were coming from all around Europe,” Haimovitz explains. “So the idea is that I wanted to expand that cultural palette, so that the composers should feel free to bring in other folk cultures or vernaculars. I was totally open to the idea of introducing Bach to styles that, if he had encountered them, he would have used.”
Matt Haimovitz plays Christ Church Cathedral at 6 and 9 p.m. on Tuesday (August 1), as part of the Vancouver Bach Festival.