J.S. Bach – namesake and raison d’être of the recurrent Festival series that kicks-off Early Music Vancouver’s annual concert season – still draws audiences like no other musical headliner from the baroque era.
Judging from the full-house midday and evening crowds that have packed Christ Church Cathedral all this month, it’d be easy to take the 18th century genius as a sui generis Force of Nature – an immemorial, bedrock datum of the musical landscape.
But “Bach didn’t just drop, fully formed, from the sky,” EMV Artistic Director Matthew White wants you to know. Musical antecedents decisively shaped his composition. And, after his death in 1750, his monumental body of work went into partial eclipse, largely forgotten by the wider public until it was reintroduced by a coterie of the next century’s star musicians.
So in this year’s Festival line-up, White has included an intriguing array of works by Bach’s predecessors and successors – some famous in their own right, some a bit more recherché – to help us situate the Master’s opus in its historic context.
And not just its musicological context, either. Bach and his contemporaries reflect a striking nexus of religious, technological and mercantile history, as well. Take, for instance, last week’s cello-and-piano concert that focused on the reinterpretation – or, arguably, rediscovery – of Bach by the 19th century “Historic Performance” movement in Germany.
Seattle keyboardist Byron Schenkman and Boston cellist Michael Unterman entitled their recital “Conversions,” to reflect the adaptation of baroque chorales and preludes into the more florid idiom of the Romantic era. But there’s also another type of conversion implicit in the program: all three composers on the bill were converts from Judaism to the prevailing Lutheranism of their cultural milieu.
Particularly poignant was the case of the Mendelssohns, Felix and his less famous (but arguably even more musically gifted) sister Fanny. Their grandfather, a celebrated Enlightenment philosopher, had pioneered what was to become Reform Judaism, but his descendants felt they had to convert for social acceptability as Leipzig one-percenters. The third composer on the program, Ignaz Moschles, was also born Jewish but converted when he was establishing his reputation as a celebrity pianist in the mould of his friend and collaborator, Chopin.
Last week’s BachFest "Conversions" performers – both of whom themselves grew up with Jewish backgrounds – managed to inject overtones of emotionally overwrought Yiddishkeit (or, maybe, just Romanticism) into their recital.
Schenkman made liberal use of the pedals on his piano, lending an almost schmaltzy resonance to Bach’s arpeggiated riffs. Against this backdrop, Unterman wove the figure of what he describes as a “chromatically tinted and verklempt outcry" in which he detects “Ashkenazi, or perhaps Roma” inspiration.
For extra Jewish emphasis, Schenkman even sported a kippah as he davened back and forth over the keyboard of EMV’s newly-gifted and freshly restored 1870 Broadwood grand. Not that he has a long history of religiosity, he admitted in a post-concert chat.
In fact, the yarmulke is a relatively recent addition. He only adopted it after last November’s U.S. presidential election, in solidarity with groups such as Muslims and Sikhs who find themselves under siege in Trump’s America just for wearing visible religious symbols.
It’s been an eye-opener, Schenkman reports, how an overt faith-marker subtly colours people’s reactions. But beyond its public, interpersonal implications, he’s noticed, the skullcap has gradually taken on more and more private, internal meaning for him. “It’s a reminder that 'this too shall pass,' that there’s an over-riding Something beyond all the noise of these times.”
A sense of religious transcendence in turbulent times also infuses tonight's Christ Church concert, the penultimate BachFest program before tomorrow’s grand finale at UBC’s Chan Centre. Titled “Missions and Mysteries,” the Thursday, August 10th, programme features baroque music from Bach’s predecessors and contemporaries in the Iberian empire of Latin America.
Don't think of these New World venues, though, as remote backwaters or outer suburbs of the baroque, warns keyboardist Henry Lebedinsky of Seattle’s Pacific Music Works, who assembled tonight's programme. “Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala, Peru – these places were fabulously rich with new-found mineral wealth.”
And where there’s a lot of nouveaux riche money, there’s bound to be a flourishing arts scene, with gala venues and patronage. In baroque Latin America, the arts hubs would be mostly focused around the amply endowed city cathedrals.
Then, too, there was another type of conversion underway: a "mission civilisatrice" to shock and awe a vast indigenous population with the majesty and emotive force of Western – especially Christian – music. And it wasn't long, Lebedinsky notes, before Latin America cultivated its own cadre of indigenously born "Western" performers and composers, several of whom feature on tonight’s bill.
Nor was the artistic transmission all a one-way street, he adds. African and indigenous strains found their way from Latin America back into the Western repertoire in Europe.
“Where do you think all of Bach’s sensuous sarabandes and rollicking chaconnes came from?” First introduced in Latin America, such dance forms migrated back to Europe to be “gentrified,” Lebedinsky submits. And Vancouverites tonightcan look forward to hearing them in their more “flavourful, hip-shaking, foot-stomping” original versions, he promises.
Not that European music itself was exactly emotionally sterile even 100 years before Bach's time. One of the most striking concerts on the Festival roster was a five-voice choral ensemble’s rendering of “The Fountains of Israel,” a cycle of biblical texts by Johann Schein, Bach’s lineal predecessor a century earlier as Cantor of the Saint Thomas Church in Leipzig.
The texts are scored in Italian madrigal style, but with German libretti – a significant innovation, in line with the newly ascendant Lutheran Church’s commitment to propagate the Bible in the vernacular, rather than Latin.
This vernacularisation opened up a vast new space for sacred music composition, as German phonetics dictated a one-note-per-syllable musical setting rather than the arcing glissandi of the Latin Mass. Schein, in “The Fountains of Israel,” grapples with the musical problem of how to inject the zest of Italian music into the novel syntax of the German liturgy.
The five Schein concert vocalists, imported from Switzerland, turn out to also be the soloists in tomorrow night’s Chan Centre gala, as well. “The Fountains of Israel” showed their very estimable talents in an intimate ensemble setting.
It will be interesting (if you can still get tickets) to see how they – and Bach – transpose the idiom of German liturgy to vast panorama of a grand passion play. Watch this space.