Jazz pianist Mehldau plays Bach – but precious little jazz
Classical music may be under siege in our schools and in trouble in our concert halls, but there is one arena where it’s riding high: jazz. It’s hard to go to a jazz gig these days without hearing a sly reference to Ravel or Schumann slipped in somewhere. And of all classical composers it’s J S Bach who seems to appeal the most. His endless streams of fast notes over an athletic bass, and ingenious way of interweaving several melodic lines simultaneously seems jazz-like already. Add a touch of syncopation, bend the harmony a little, and pretty soon you’ve crossed over the divide.
With the exception of Keith Jarrett and the late lamented Jacques Loussier, no jazz musician has worked harder to play up that affinity than pianist Brad Mehldau. He’s released an entire album of Bach pieces, and he’s developed quite a skill at conjuring an improvisation on a Bach melody on the spot, as this concert proved. He came on to the Barbican stage to warm applause, soberly dressed and unsmiling as ever. He then sat head reverently bowed while the Britten Sinfonia played four modern arrangements of Bach at his most severe and abstract.
These were so seductively coloured you could almost forget just how strict they were underneath. Stravinsky’s arrangement was the leanest, but Charles Coleman’s arrangement of Bach’s B Minor Prelude was luxuriantly full and melancholy. As it died away Mehldau picked up its final phrase and sent it wandering up the keyboard, as his left-hand tentatively sounded out new harmonic regions. Then the orchestra led Bach into a new region of crystalline strangeness, in Anton Webern’s arrangement of the fabulously complex six-part Ricercare, which Mehldau made more rhapsodic and romantic. Strangest of all was Luciano Berio’s arrangement of the vast fugue from the Art of Fugue which Bach left unfinished at his death. Berio ended the arrangement on an otherworldly discord, as if Bach’s departing spirit were melding with futuristic modernity, to which Mehldau added an exquisitely tender and totally un-bach-like gloss.
Thus far we’d barely heard a hint of jazz. After the interval, in the world premiere of Brad Mehldau’s Piano Concerto, we heard a touch more – but only a touch, in the occasional bluesy moments that would appear surprisingly in mid-phrase and then vanish again. Mostly it was a luxuriantly slow, sustained piece of surprisingly old-fashioned Americana. Bach had entirely vanished; instead the strongest echoes were American film composers like Elmer Bernstein, and further in the background Aaron Copland. Mehldau can produce music of thrillingly headlong energy as a solo pianist, but that was disappointingly absent here. Still, the interplay between the orchestra’s nostalgic, beautifully played phrases and Mehldau’s supersubtle responses was so engrossing one could forgive the piece’s occasional longueurs.