Bach Festival Does Spokane Proud
Northwest Bach Festival Friday, Feb. 6, at St. John’s Cathedral, and Sunday, Feb. 8, at The Met
The Northwest Bach Festival closed its 20th season with two concerts showing exceptional performances by both visiting artists and local performers.
Reviewing the past 20 years of the Bach Festival, I conclude that the combination of outstanding guest artists with highly committed local professionals is the key to the festival’s continuing success.
The catalyst for making this combination work is inspired leadership, nowadays the leadership of one of the world’s truly great musicians, Gunther Schuller.
At Friday’s concert at St. John’s Cathedral, Schuller conducted some of Bach’s most familiar pieces and some of his most infrequently performed works. As always, he brought a fresh touch to even the best-known pieces.
Schuller opened and closed Friday’s concert with two of Bach’s most famous works, the Third and the Fifth Brandenburg Concertos. Both are often played in a bold, almost aggressive, fashion that misses the lightness and dancing character Schuller finds in Bach’s music.
The adept soloists for the Brandenburg Fifth were Spokane violinist Kelly Farris and flutist Gale Coffee, joined by French harpsichordist Ilton Wjuniski. Farris and Coffee neatly matched each other’s smooth phrases as they floated on Schuller’s bouncy accompaniment. Wjuniski made Bach’s brilliant harpsichord part sparkle without ever sounding harsh. He is one of those few harpsichorists who can make the instrument sing as well as dance.
The Bach Choir, excellently trained by Tamara Schupman, sang the Sanctus in D, Bach’s infrequently heard re-working of a Mass movement by 17th-century German composer Johann Kaspar Kerll. The Sanctus is very short, over in a flash. But it is a startling display of what Bach could do in bringing the style of a very different older composer into line with his own musical techniques and improving matters when Kerll’s imagination ran out.
Somewhat more familiar, Cantata No. 60, “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort,” presents a short but intense conversation between Fear (the alto solo) and Hope (the tenor). Fear remains unconvinced until the intercession of Jesus, whose comforting bass at last frees Fear. My only reservation about the performance lay in the difficulty I had in hearing alto JoAnne Bouma and tenor Fritz Robertson, both of whom sounded fine in rehearsal. Bass Robert Honeysucker, on the other hand, was both audible and imposingly rich sounding from where I sat.
The festival finale, a chamber music concert at The Met Sunday with members of the Spokane String Quartet and guests Ilton Wjuniski and Margriet Tindemans, provided a glimpse into the sources of Bach’s style and the results that led from it. Bach’s Bohemian predecessors, J.H. Schmelzer and Heinrich Biber, were represented along with a sonata by his friend J.D. Zelenka and works from the circle of Bach and his students.
Wjuniski showed his accustomed musical sensitivity and technical elan both as soloist in the Harpsichord Concerto and as an accompanying partner elsewhere on the program. Tindemans likewise confirmed her reputation as a great viola da gamba player and as a performer on the baroque viola. The two are unexcelled in the basso continuo required for baroque composition.
Kelly Farris gave his usual intelligent and elegant playing to the Fugue in G minor thought, perhaps, to be by J.S. Bach. Its strange mixture of strict counterpoint and improvisatory passages hints at Bach’s organ toccatas.
The evening’s surprise came in the spirited, nimble-fingered playing of violinist Karen Walthinsen. Spokane audiences know her playing as the violist of the Spokane String Quartet, occasional appearances as violinist on the programs of Allegro and as a member of the second violin section of the symphony. Nothing previously known about her prepared me for the flair she exhibited Sunday in the intricacies of Biber and Schmelzer, nor for the fun she seemed to be having with the animal imitations in Biber’s Sonata Representativa.
What a pleasure to be introduced to a fine new talent alongside the established artists heard in previous Bach Festivals. These festivals are a justifiable source of pride in Spokane’s musical life. Long may they thrive.
, DataTimes