Annual festival celebrates legendary composer

Johann Sebastian Bach was a man of many facets, “all of them turned on” (to borrow a phrase from baseball sage Casey Stengel).

Bach was a composer, a keyboard player, a teacher, an administrator. He could engrave his own music and write blistering letters of complaint to town councils.

And he was the father of 20 children with two successive wives.

Some of the many sides of Bach’s accomplishments will on display during the 33rd annual Northwest Bach Festival, beginning Tuesday with the first of three concerts at St. John’s Cathedral.

Gunther Schuller, artistic director of the festival since 1993, has chosen a group of works that show Bach as the master of music for church services and for coffeehouse jam sessions.

“People are always eager to hear the Bach blockbusters: the Passions and the B minor Mass,” Schuller said in a lunchtime conversation last winter. “And I love to conduct those big works, but they’re just the tip of a very big iceberg.

“What I have always wanted to do in this festival is show the huge range of Bach’s music all the way from works for a single soloist to music for a choir, even sometimes double choirs, with soloists and orchestra, sometimes double orchestras.

“And Bach didn’t just exist in isolation,” Schuller added. “He was preceded by, surrounded with and succeeded by remarkable composers of great music that is often undeservedly neglected. Even some famous composers wrote beautiful things we never hear.”

Schuller, who celebrated his 85th birthday in November, is noted for his own multifaceted career as a composer, conductor, publisher, record producer, author and conservatory president.

He has received an increasingly long list of awards including a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, a Pulitzer Prize and numerous honorary degrees.

Schuller has put together a six-year plan of Bach Festival concerts that includes a wide range of Bach’s music and music by his predecessors, contemporaries and successors.

“Maybe a six-year plan is optimistic considering my age,” Schuller said. “But I did want to avoid the Stalin echo by proposing a five-year plan.”

This year’s festival features 10 local musicians and visiting artists performing more than a dozen compositions.

Tuesday’s opening concert resembles a program such as Bach’s gathering of colleagues and students might have performed at Zimmermann’s Coffee House in Leipzig.

It opens with Adagio for Solo Violin and String by Francisco Bonporti, an Italian priest whose music Bach knew and performed, and some of whose music was long mistaken for that of Bach.

Also on Tuesday’s program are two double concertos by Bach: one for two violins, the other for violin and oboe, which Bach adapted from concertos for two harpsichords.

The concert concludes with Georg Philipp Telemann’s Concerto in D for Trumpet. Telemann was a longtime friend of Bach’s and the godfather to the second of Bach’s sons.

Soloists for Tuesday’s program include Spokane Symphony players Jason Moody and John Bennett, violin; Keith Thomas, oboe; and William Berry, trumpet. Schuller will conduct the Festival Chamber Ensemble.

Schuller will turn to sacred music for the festival’s second concert on March 5.

Soprano Janet Brown, mezzo soprano Katherine Growdon, counter tenor Josh Haberman, tenor Rockland Osgood and baritone Donald Wilkinson will join the Festival Orchestra and Chorus in two cantatas by Bach as well as motets on the subject of St. Peter: “Le Reniement de Saint Pierre” by Marc-Antoine Charpentier and “Tu es Petrus” by Felix Mendelssohn.

The festival finale March 12 features a piano recital by Randall Hodgkinson which includes the well-known French Suite in G major and the little-known Sonata in D major by Bach, along with works by his English predecessor William Byrd and his younger Iberian contemporaries Carlos de Seixas from Portugal and Antonio Soler from Spain.

Hodgkinson achieved recognition as winner of the International American Music Competition for pianists sponsored by Carnegie Hall and the Rockefeller Foundation.

He has appeared frequently as a recitalist and soloist with major orchestras including those in Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta and Cleveland, as well as orchestras in Iceland and Italy.

Hodgkinson is a faculty member at the New England Conservatory and Wellesley College. He is a member of the Boston chamber Music Society and also performs four-hand and two-piano literature with his wife, Leslie Amper.

Each Bach Festival concert will be preceded by a discussion of the music on the program by Jane Ellsworth, musicologist on the faculty of Eastern Washington University.