Program Notes

Bach has been from the beginning the most performed composer at the Token Creek Festival. Although all of us — performers, management, board — have had manifold opportunities to engage with Bach’s music, we found many aspects of his music needing more space in our lives, both as practitioners and as listeners.

Our Bach offerings proceeded from a perspective of historical awareness. Thus we featured the modern piano as solo and continuo instrument in many of our performances, honoring Bach’s own fascination with this instrument, of which he was a prime developer and early exponent. We were also interested in presenting a good sampling of arrangements — by Bach himself, by Robert Schumann, by ourselves — as a way of bringing wider representation to the organ chorale preludes. We have also proffered answers to interesting old questions:

• What is the best order of movements for performance of The Musical Offering?
• In what octave should the contrabass play in Brandenburg 6?
• Where and how should the “extra” movements in the G major violin-keyboard sonata be placed?

Since historical performance, with original instruments, has provided so much refreshment of the repertoire, we decided to pursue our admiration of another kind of historical performance, as exemplified by such artifacts as Mengelberg’s version of the St. Matthew Passion, in which the music might be approached as much as possible as if it was written yesterday.

Our final YouTube sampling, Bach II, begins with some sections of the Art of the Fugue. The versions you will hear are not ideal, not because the player is not really a pianist (he isn’t), not because he is often struggling through dense vegetation (he is), but because the pieces are really a two-way transaction between Bach and a Player (or Score Reader), a private transaction hardly meant to be overheard. In these radically expressive Fugues, Bach tells us more about his inner thoughts than he does anywhere else. (It is hoped that all you better pianists who have never tried getting a finger on each note in these pieces — the problem in a nutshell — will adopt the endeavor for yourselves. )

We then move to Chorale Preludes originally for organ, here performed by oboe (chorale melodies) and strings (chorale-derived counter melodies). The modern listener, unless they know the original words of the sacred songs used here, will miss some of the fervor and specificity of the melodic choices used to enhance their presence. These are as much vocal (word-based) as instrumental settings of these beautiful inherited melodies.

We have (sadly) only performed six complete cantatas in our long history, though in our other musical lives have all encountered many more. Since they involve a larger aggregate of performers than we commonly had on stage, we contented ourselves with a large selection of arias. Out of context they lose a certain significance and heft, but the ones we include here are simply too beautiful or too striking or purely tuneful to resist sharing in excerpt form. Hearing them is like hearing an actor recite a scene from a Shakespeare play, leaving you fascinated to restore the context for such a distinctive utterance.

Finally, we conclude by offering a complete piece, an intriguing one since Bach, by publishing it in three packets, deliberately avoided signaling the sequence of movements. The piece is a number of things: a reaction to the most significant “guest appearance” of his life (at the court of Frederick the Great), a Hymn to the art of Canon — to its formal flexibility (anything from a child-like Round to nearly un-trackable textural complexity), to Canon’s possible meaning as allegiance to old-time Craft, but also as spiritual connection to Afterworlds. The piece is also a record of a Feat demonstrated on the trip, an improvised Three-Voice Ricercar, and a rejoinder to a challenge ducked, later solved back home triumphantly in the Six-Voice Ricercar, the first major entry in the Solo Piano repertoire.

Bach is an everyday practice for musical people everywhere, whether playing or listening, and our dedication to this music has never been a choice, but a necessity.