HAPPY BIRTHDAY bach
CELEBRATING THE MASTER IN CONCERT
IF springtime comes, can Bach be far behind? No, he cannot. He was born on March 21, a happy coincidence that ensures that we celebrate him on the very heels of spring’s arrival. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach, like springtime itself, is filled with promise and optimism. That does not mean that it is always cheerful, although lovers of the Brandenburg Concertos know that few composers rivaled him in inspiring elation. But a listener who begins to grasp Bach’s outlook finds that even his doleful moments are not entirely despondent. His ruminations may take us to dark reaches of the soul; but even at their most somber, they usually allow a glimmer of hope to beam in, a suggestion that reward and consolation wait at the end of the tunnel. Many moderns will not understand that in the way an orthodox Lutheran of the 18th century would have — that, if all goes well, life is a tough slog that terminates in yearnedfor heavenly rest. Still, even those who do not tread theological footpaths can find some correspondence in their outlooks. Bach is often filled with joy, and he invites us to celebrate with him. But, as a profoundly human composer, he was also acquainted with grief, and he shows us a route to embrace that, to experience it profoundly, and to push through to the other side.
His 333rd birthday this past Wednesday was oddly silent for Santa Fe’s concertgoers, but musicians will be playing catch-up this week, beginning with an all-Bach organ recital performed by Linda Raney at First Presbyterian Church. “Bach lived in a period when people were very creative and very intelligent,” she observed, “but there was also an expectation that the music of an individual composer would to some extent resemble that of another, that all composers would follow the rules and color inside the lines. There’s an underlying logic to Baroque music.” But that still left plenty of room for gifted composers to show originality, and none was more gifted than Bach.
Raney flips through the pages of his chorale prelude “Vater unser im Himmelreich” (BWV 682), which will be the second of the three pieces in her half-hour recital. In this elaboration of a Lutheran hymn for the “Our Father” prayer, she points to rising figures that convey optimism, to descending chromatic lines that she feels suggest pain, to the constant onward tread of the bass line, to how musical ideas are shortened or expanded to make the parts interlock in innovative ways, sometimes in canonic imitation. “It is extraordinary how he uses figures like this to paint his musical picture,” she said. “I almost want to call this ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ the journey of the pilgrim. He is able to do all of that in these seven pages and hold it together. You feel you have been on a journey from the beginning to the end, that the journey has included emotional richness, pain, the feeling of hope, the feeling of moving forward, the feeling of just reflecting on the ornamented chorale. I liken Bach, in a way, to Einstein, in that he was able to explain his theories in a way that people can understand. It’s not so erudite as to be beyond the comprehension of listeners. Bach had a practical side. He can communicate.”
Aficionados sometimes cite “Vater unser” as the most complex of all Bach’s chorale preludes. He published it in 1739 in the collection he titled ClavierÜbung III (Keyboard Exercise III), which the Bach scholar Gregory Butler has characterized as standing “on the threshold of [his] late period” and revealing the composer’s “preoccupation with saying the last word in a given genre with an attendant monumentality of conception.” Raney will bookend it with two earlier works. The program opens with his Concerto in D minor after Vivaldi (BWV 596), a transformation for keyboard of a work the Italian composer had orchestrated for strings.
To conclude, she will play one of the most famous of all Bach’s organ works, the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565), which even casual listeners instantly recognize thanks to the role it has played in spooky Halloween soundtracks. Walt Disney’s film Fantasia had a lot to do with that. In fact, the piece’s pedigree is spotty. Some scholars consider it to be not by Bach at all — some because it is too backward-looking compared to his other organ pieces, some because it is too weirdly avant-garde. (Go figure.) In 1981, the Bach scholar Peter Williams put forth an opinion that Raney finds reasonable: It
was originally written as a piece for violin (maybe by Bach, maybe not), which explains some figuration that aligns with period violin-writing but seems nonnative to the organ.
The pedigree of Bach’s music will surface again this week in this year’s installments of Santa Fe Pro Musica’s annual Holy Week concerts at Loretto Chapel. The period-instrument players have put together an appealing program that includes a trio sonata by Corelli, a set of variations by Vivaldi, and two works by Bach, his Cantata No. 170 (“Vergnügte Ruh”) and his F-major Oboe Concerto (BWV 1053R). The cantata, which Bach composed for a Sunday service in Leipzig in 1726, features a solo contralto — here it will be sung by returning visitor Avery Amereau — who is assisted by an ensemble of oboe d’amore (an alto-pitched oboe), two violins, viola, and a basso continuo group, of which the organ also fulfills the role of an obbligato soloist. In a late revision of this piece, prepared in 1746 or 1747, Bach reassigned the solo organ part to a flute, which leaves modern interpreters with some deciding to do. But that option pales beside the bloodline considerations of the F-major Oboe Concerto, which will feature Baroque oboe virtuoso Gonzalo X. Ruiz (who also plays oboe d’amore in the cantata), an Argentinian star of both the modern oboe and its Baroque-era antecedent.
The oboe was a favorite instrument of Bach, who used it in many cantatas and other sacred music, both as a soloist in the instrumental sinfonias and as an obbligato partner to the singers in arias. “He wrote over 220 individual movements using oboes of different sizes,” Ruiz said in a phone interview. “That’s more than any other instrument. Violin was a distant second, even though Bach was actually an accomplished violinist. He was close to his oboe players. In fact, both of the oboists he worked with most in Leipzig were godparents to some of his kids — not the kids who became musicians, but he had lots of others. I play in a group that has done all the Bach cantatas in New York, and for an oboist, that is a gift that keeps on giving.”
If Bach loved the oboe so much, why did he leave no solo concertos for oboists? “It’s just that we don’t have the original versions of those pieces,” Ruiz said. “Well, it depends on who you believe, but there are up to five oboe concertos that survive not as oboe concertos but in other forms. All of Bach’s harpsichord concertos are reworkings of preexisting pieces for other instruments. In a couple of cases, the original versions have also survived, but we can sort of guess about the original versions of the other ones.” The F-major Oboe Concerto he will play is widely accepted as the original setting of what he recast around 1740 as his Harpsichord Concerto in E major, an arrangement he made to play with a community orchestra he was leading in Leipzig. The harpsichord’s melody line, transposed a semitone higher to F major, sits uncannily well on the oboe. Ruiz feels strongly that the harpsichord concertos are not the only works by Bach that are later states of lost originals. A few years ago, he proposed that Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 2, a familiar work that features solo flute (and, indeed, is a keystone of that instrument’s repertoire) is actually a later reworking of a piece that initially spotlighted the oboe. Ruiz didn’t leave it as a theoretical argument. He recorded it (for the Avie label) with oboe taking the accustomed place of the flute, transposing it down a tone. Suddenly, the solo line projected from the orchestra in a way the flute does not, and listeners conceded that his argument was a strong one.
To some extent, such insights interlock with his experience in mastering oboes from Bach’s period, before they evolved into the modern form of the instrument used in today’s symphony orchestras. Still, he doesn’t want to overstate that case. “Everybody who starts playing period instruments does it largely for philosophical reasons,” he said, but at some point he came to realize that the instrument was simply a means to an end, and that “using the tools doesn’t guarantee too much about the product.” “We can talk about the special characteristics of historical instruments,” he said, “and how the composers wrote with that in mind. But on other hand, you don’t want to leave toolmarks on your work.”
Raney was more insistent about how an instrument based on Bach-era ideals can lead to a more attuned interpretation. “From a physical standpoint,” she said, “Bach demands a certain ‘razzle-dazzle,’ virtuosic touch — you might say a sensitivity of touch — to bring the music alive.” But, for an organist, “touch” is determined to a great extent by the instrument itself. When she was a student, she learned almost exclusively on instruments with electro-pneumatic actions. They had long been standard in organbuilding, but in the 1970s builders began focusing on “tracker action” organs that connected the player to the sound-making part of the organ through strictly mechanical construction, essentially returning to the organ principles of Bach’s pre-electrical era.
Ten years ago, First Presbyterian Church, where Raney serves as organist and music director, installed a tracker-action organ by the Massachusetts firm C.B. Fisk. “When we got the Fisk,” she said, “that was the first time I had daily exposure to a tracker instrument. I had heard about the joy of tracker instruments and had gone to workshops where I had the occasional opportunity to play them. But having that wonderful daily relationship is something else again. It is phenomenal to have learned an instrument and then, thanks to an instrument like this, to go deeper with it, to gain more artistic control of it, of the sound of it. It’s a matter of going from the note being either on or off, as is the case with an electro-pneumatic instrument, to having the nuance of attack and release that you have with a tracker action. There’s something so mentally satisfying about Bach to begin with, and an instrument like this just deepens the experience.”
details
Linda Raney plays Bach organ works 5:30 p.m. Friday, March 23 First Presbyterian Church, 208 Grant Ave. No tickets necessary, donations welcome
Santa Fe Pro Musica Baroque Ensemble Music by Corelli, Vivaldi, and Bach, with contralto Avery Amereau and Baroque oboist Gonzalo X. Ruiz 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday, March 29 and 30; 6 p.m. Saturday, March 31 Loretto Chapel, 207 Old Santa Fe Trail Tickets ($20-$75) through ticketssantafe.org; 505-988-1234
“There’s something so mentally satisfying about Bach to begin with.” — organist Linda Raney