Artistry, Enthusiasm High In Enjoyable Bach Performance

Northwest Bach Festival Wednesday, Feb. 5, The Met

Half the performers on Wednesday’s Northwest Bach Festival program were Spokane musicians and half visiting artists. But the concert took no halfway measures. The level of artistry and enthusiasm was uniformly high in a concert of chamber music by J.S. Bach, three of his sons and two Bach family friends.

The older Bach was represented by his poetically meditative Partita for flute alone. Michael Faust plays his modern silver flute convincingly, with phrasing that reminds me of poetic speech. Contemporary critical thought suggests I should be wanting this music played on a wooden flute. But the skipping jollity Faust achieved in the Courante movement and the longing sadness of the following Sarabande made the modern flute sound perfect for the task.

Kelly Farris, on the other hand, traded in his modern violin and bow for the evening, playing instead their 18th-century predecessors. That exchange looks simple enough but is tricky for a modern string player. Baroque violins have a shorter neck and use hard-to-keep-in-tune gut strings, and the baroque bow behaves very differently from the modern type.

The ever-versatile Farris took to the older instrument as though he were born with it. The energy with which he tore through the many difficult passages in the finale of Johann Christian Bach’s Quintet in D major made a spectacular finish to a long evening’s concert.

Oboist Gary Plowman, bassoonist Barbara Novak and cellist Cheryl Carney also showed throughout the evening just what a corps of excellent musicians we have in Spokane. Despite some hesitancy here then there, Plowman’s responsive dialogues with Faust in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s unpredictable Trio Sonata in E major were a joy. So were Carney’s lyrically played solos in Christian Bach’s Quintet.

In the past, Spokane has heard some fine lute playing from performers such as Stephen Stubbs and Paul O’Dette, but their appearances seem a very long time ago. The playing of Catherine Liddell, both in the ensemble of J.G. Goldberg’s Trio Sonata in C major and in four short solo works by Silvius Weiss reminded me what quiet pleasure this instrument gives. I should say “instruments” since Liddell played the theorbo (a very large lute) in the Goldberg and a normal-sized lute in the Weiss.

Liddell joked that lutenists spend three-quarters of their lives tuning the many strings of their instrument. Almost predictably, there were moments of poor intonation and roughness in tone in the Weiss pieces, but much beauty, too.

I have praised the sensitive playing of viola da gambist Margriet Tindemans and the spectacular virtuosity of harpsichordist Ilton Wjuniski in these columns before. No use getting tedious about it, but Wjuniski and Tindemans were their usual selves Wednesday.

, DataTimes MEMO: The final concerts of the Bach Festival will be at First Presbyterian Church, tonight at 8 and repeated Sunday at 3 p.m.