Connecticut College early music fest offers evening full of Bach

I feared, after hearing the first two segments of the Connecticut Early Music Festival’s Friday night all-Bach presentation at Connecticut College’s Evans Hall, that it might turn into a pretty-good-butnot-much-better-than-that concert. But then it got better. Much better.

The performers were Aisslinn Nosky, violin; Guy Fishman, cello; and Ian Watson, harpsichord. And it was Nosky’s rendition of the solo Partita in E major, which opened the post-intermission portion of the program, that made it more than the highlight of this particular evening; it would have scored as a highlight of any concert-going evening.

Though the piece, one of six large-scale compositions that Bach wrote for unaccompanied — Special Committee of the Whole, 6:30 p.m., Municipal Building; special mayor and council meeting, 7:30 p.m., Municipal Building. — Zoning Board of Appeals, 7:30 p.m., Municipal Building. — Groton Utilities Commission, 10 a.m., Municipal Building.

— Board of Education, 6 p.m., Town Hall Annex, Conference Room 1.

— Planning Commission, 7 p.m., Town Hall Annex, Conference Room 2; Noank Fire District Park Commission, 7 p.m., Noank Fire House.

— Inland Wetlands Agency, 7 p.m., Town Hall Annex, violin, lacks the overall grandeur of the companion work in D minor, with its monumental chaconne movement, or in C major, with its architecturally miraculous second movement constituting the longest fugue Bach ever wrote for any instrument or instrumental combination (and that’s saying something), it compensates with a galanterie befitting the key of E major, one often associated with an airy translucence (compare, for example, “Spring” from Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” or Mendelssohn’s Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”).

Nosky’s highly virtuosic performance — there are lots and lots of notes in this piece, nowhere more aboundingly than in the whirligig of the concluding movement — astonished with the computer-accuracy placement of the

— Social Services Board, 5 p.m., Council Chambers; W.P.C.A., 7 p.m., Town Hall, Council Chambers.

— Senior Citizens, 1:30 p.m., Senior Citizens Center; Finance Committee work session, 5 p.m., Town Hall Annex, Meeting Room; Ledyard Town Council, 7 p.m, Town Hall, Council Chambers. — Open Space Committee, 7:30 p.m., Town Hall. — Public Safety Commission, 6 p.m., Town Hall, Council Chambers. — Public Works/Solid Waste Standing Committee, 5:30 p.m., Town Hall, Room 102. numerous multiple stops, necessarily a feature of works for solo violin lest they end up sounding like undifferentiated chains of mere melody. Nosky accomplished this while still honoring — a great balancing act — the birthright of a partita as a rhythmically lithe suite of dances.

Indeed, for the first 60 or so years of the 20th century, Baroque works of this sort were most often played with a romantic overlay that sounded as if the soloist wished s/he were performing a Bruch or Wieniawski concerto instead. The E major partita’s gavotte movement, which violinists too numerous to tabulate have featured as a concert-ending encore, sometimes finds, even to this day, the multiple stops crunched out by the soloist

NEW LONDON

— Housing Authority board of commissioners, 6 p.m., William Park, 127 Hempstead St.

— Municipal Revenue Board, 4:30 p.m., City Hall, Council Anteroom.

— Water and Water Pollution Control Authority, 7 p.m., Senior Center, library.

— Center for Emergency Services Building Committee, 6 p.m., North Stonington Volunteer Fire Company Headquarters.

— Board of Selectmen, 7 p.m., New Town Hall, Conference Room.

— Conservation Commission, 6 p.m., New Town Hall, Conference Room. — Redevelopment Agency, 5 p.m., City Hall. as if begrudgingly dispatched after a heavy meal on a muggy day.

Nosky, no doubt aware of this outmoded tradition, beautifully demonstrated the glories of performance practice that is the musically lean equivalent of nouvelle cuisine.

Directly before intermission, Fishman gave a fine rendition of the oft-performed and quite tuneful D-major sonata for viola da gamba and harpsichord (a viola da gamba being an archaic instrument, literally a “leg viol,” with more and differently tuned strings than a modern-day cello, which most often substitutes for it, as was the case here).

Fishman, mirroring contemporary style, played with a good-natured navigation of the melodic and harmonic subtleties that distinguish Bach from his contemporaries, making the manifold technical

— Harbor Management Commission, 5 p.m., City Hall; Board of Public Utilities Commissioners/ Sewer Authority, 6 p.m., 16 S. Golden St.

— 60 Sixth St. Committee of Sale, 19 N. Cliff St. Committee of Sale and Board of Review of Dangerous Buildings, all begin at 5 p.m., 23 Union St.

— Route 156 Bike Way/Sound View Improvements Committee, 4:30 p.m., Town Hall; Sound View Commission, 7:30 p.m., Shoreline Community Center; Zoning Commission, 7:30 p.m., Town Hall.

— CT Audubon Roger Tory Peterson Estuary Society, 2 p.m., Town Hall; Volunteer Incentive Committee, 5 p.m., Town Hall; Point O'Woods Board of Directors, 6 p.m., Town Hall; Duck River Garden Club, 6:30 p.m., Town Hall; Inland Wetlands and Watercourses Commission, 7 p.m., Town Hall.

— Matson Ridge Homeowners Association, 6 p.m., Town Hall. complications seem quite effortless. The performance of the andante movement was especially elegant and silky.

It’s difficult to assess Watson’s performance of two keyboard preludes and fugues (including one set differing from what the program listed, without any mention of same) in that the sound of the harpsichord itself was so murky, or perhaps the registration so ill-chosen, as to obscure much of the interior detail. Even with that (or perhaps because of it), Watson, who has admittedly played and conducted an immense amount of material throughout the several-week festival, appeared to be not much engaged in the performance.

The concert’s opener, a sonata for violin and harpsichord obbligato (i.e. with the keyboard part fully written out, as opposed to improvised

— Democratic Town Committee, 7:30 p.m., Town Hall. — Board of Selectmen, 9 a.m., Town Hall.

— Board of Education, 7 p.m., Preston Veterans Memorial School; Conservation and Agriculture Commission, 7:30 p.m., Town Hall.

— Parks and Recreation Commission, 7 p.m., Town Hall; Planning and Zoning Commission, 7;30 p.m., Preston Veterans' Memorial School.

— Preston Redevelopment Agency, 7 p.m., Town Hall.

— Board of Education Policy Subcommittee, 5:30 p.m., Salem School, Media Center.

— Recreation Commission, 6 p.m., Human Services Community Room, S. Broad Street, Pawcatuck; over a given bass-line) suffered from the listener’s inability to fully savor the interaction between Nosky’s solo material and the coordinative right-hand of the harpsichord part, a result once again of the latter’s indistinct sound. And even Nosky’s otherwise competent performance ran into a few intonational snags.

With the final work of the evening, an abnormally short four-movement trio (brevity often being welcome at the end of a concert), the three performers parlayed the great success of the preceding partita and gamba sonata into a wonderfully satisfying and collaborative rendition, one that portends especially well for the group’s final festival installment today, featuring the “Four Seasons” (all four of them, Spring through to Winter!) of Vivaldi. Economic Development Commission special meeting, 6 p.m., Olde Mistick Village, Meeting House; Conservation Commission, 7 p.m., Police Station, Meeting Room, 173 S. Broad St., Pawcatuck.

— K-12 Building Committee special meeting, 6 p.m., Central Office; Water Pollution Control Authority, 6:30 p.m., police station meeting room; special Town Meeting, 7 p.m., Stonington High School, Auditorium.

— Board of Selectmen, 7 p.m., police station, Community Room.

— Planning & Zoning Commission, 6:30 p.m., Town Hall; Representative Town Meeting special meeting, 7 p.m., Town Hall, Auditorium.

— Senior Citizens Commission, 4 p.m., Community Center, 24 Rope Ferry Road.