BIG ON BACH
Festival pays tribute to composer
Rebranding has its perils; any quest for the bright and new risks alienating those who prefer the tried and true.
But in 2016, Vancouver Early Music Festival boasts a rethinking that makes perfect sense. The idea is to host not an early music smorgasbord, but a feast focused almost entirely on one colossal figure — Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).
The festival offers 10 events, with all but one of them in Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver, and each event offers an illuminating pre-concert talk 45 minutes before curtain time. Don’t be put off by the under-construction appearance of this wonderful old church, the scaffolding is all external and inside things are in perfect shape.
Bach offers incomparable riches to be explored and re-explored, and his appeal is inexhaustible. Along with favourite works and admired performers, the festival offers some unexpected ideas and interpretations: it kicks off August 2 with the iconic and massive Goldberg Variations, but performed by master of jazz/improvised piano Dan Tepfer, a co-presentation with Coastal Jazz.
Week one also includes harpsichordist Davitt Moroney presenting The Art of the Fugue, which he calls “Bach’s musical testament.” (Fans attracted to the ideas in Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach might want to check out Moroney’s detailed program notes at earlymusic.bc.ca.) Then there are the somewhat neglected sonatas for violin and harpsichord, with violinist Ingrid Matthews and harpsichordist Byron Schenkman; and a lunch-hour program of the Schübler Chorales for organ and voices.
The festival’s capstone will be Bach’s B minor Mass on August 5 at the Chan. This counts as a late work, and is Bach’s highly personal take on the Latin Mass (quite acceptable, by the way, to 18th century Lutherans).
While the mass took final shape only in the late 1740s, quite a bit of it is reworkings of earlier compositions. Whatever its genesis — and whatever point Bach was making for posterity with its creation — the mass is one of the touchstone works of the repertoire and is pro- grammed by Vancouver’s top choirs on a regular basis.
This performance, however, will be substantially different from anything Vancouver has witnessed before. Alexander Weimann will direct Montreal’s Arion Baroque Orchestra and eight soloists and a small backup group of singers will add a bit of extra oomph to the biggest choruses. That’s it, no choir, per se.
Early Music Vancouver’s Matthew White says the festival version of this will be closer to what Bach might have heard back at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in the mid-1700s. Forces are small in comparison t o the grand performances we have become used to, but this makes increased clar- ity and individual shaping of the materials possible.
White stresses that although the production aims to be authentic and informed, the festival approach to performing Bach is pluralistic.
There are many valid ways of presenting this music, and our zeal to understand how it might have been is just one of many different paths to understanding.
And it’s that breadth and variety that promises to invigorate the entire festival. Many voices, many attitudes. But one Bach.
Next week we will preview week two.