Bach Festival Gives Italian Musicians Their Due

Northwest Bach Festival Friday, The Met

The baroque Italians taught their German neighbors to sing. The music on the brilliant opening concert of the 19th Northwest Bach Festival showed off such songful Italians as Albinoni, Vivaldi, Scarlatti and Locatelli along side their best German “pupil,” J.S. Bach.

The concert at The Met featured three of the the finest performers one could hope to hear these days: flutist Michael Faust, harpsichordist Ilton Wjuniski and viola da gambist Margriet Tindemans.

The program interspersed trio sonatas by Bach with the music he knew and loved by the Italians. If the program order looked academic, the playing was anything but stuffy. The notes danced off the page, sobbed in operatic anguish, and made love to the heart.

Faust seems an anomaly on today’s baroque performance scene. Nowadays, the music of Bach’s time is “supposed” to be played on historical instruments, instruments of the 17th or 18th centuries or modern replicas. In the case of the flute, that would be a wooden instrument with no keys (or maybe one, at most).

Faust dares to play the same type of silver flute he uses as solo flutist in the Cologne Radio Orchestra. But the way he used it beautifully spun out the clear, singing style of slow movements and gave a dancing dash to the fast movements.

If there is a harpsichordist whose playing is more expressive than Wjuniski’s, I do not know whose it might be. The harpsichord is not, by nature, an easy instrument to make expressive. Unlike the piano (or the clavichord), the loudness of harpsichord sound cannot be changed by the amount of force the player applies to a note.

Wjuniski, dazzling in both the trio sonatas and in Bach’s solo transcription of a Vivaldi concerto, coaxed beautiful expression from the instrument. He did so with subtle flexibility of rhythm - the tiniest hesitations and anticipations of the “normal” placement of notes within the beat and with an enormous variety in the ways he separated or connected one note to the next. Wjuniski’s task was lightened Friday by the excellence of the instrument he used, an extremely responsive harpsichord built by Per Walthinsen of Portland.

The viola da gamba part of baroque music is often taken for granted. The player of this six-string, cello-like instrument often merely adds to the bass sonority by duplicating what the left hand of the harpsichordist plays. But Margriet Tindemans never allowed this part to be taken for granted. She added a rich variety of colors to the texture of the music, and she showed startling virtuosity when Bach’s bass lines went wild, as they did conspicuously in opening and closing sonatas on Friday’s program.

Nothing could more appropriately describe this concert than the Latin motto inscribed on the lid of the Walthinsen harpsichord: “Musica laetitia comes medicina dolorum” - The joy of music serves as a balm to sadness.

, DataTimes