Pianist’S Performance A Joyful Occasion

Northwest Bach Festival Tuesday, Feb. 16, The Met

Fifty years ago, harpsichordists began to take back Bach’s keyboard music from pianists who thought it was theirs for keeps. Pianist Veronica Jochum showed Tuesday what pleasures pianists and audiences have been missing.

Jochum’s recital at The Met, “The Piano Inspired by Bach,” will be remembered as one of this Bach Festival’s most beautiful events.

In a world filled with fine pianists, Jochum is something special. She one of those rare artists who allows you to forget about the instrument and provides the listener with direct access to what was in the composer’s mind. Seldom can one hear such a warm, singing tone backed with such deeply intellectual musical understanding.

Jochum began with some of J.S. Bach’s simplest music and ended with one of his towering masterpieces. In between there were Johannes Brahms’s serene chorale prelude and a walk on the wild side of Bach’s inspiration with a movement from Gaunter Schuller’s Sonata-Fantasia.

The “Six Little Preludes for Beginners” and “Two-Part Inventions” make up every piano student’s introduction to Bach. In her eloquent spoken remarks, Jochum talked about the origins of the pieces and how they compared with Bach’s larger works. Under her hands, Bach’s melodies chased and sported with each other, but they were always singing whether calm or racing.

The same was true of two preludes and fugues from the second book of the “Well-Tempered Clavier” and in the mighty “Italian Concerto” which ended Jochum’s recital.

Brahms always looked to Bach for inspiration, even as he lay dying. Jochum chose four chorale preludes originally for organ, written at the very end of Brahms’s life and later transcribed for piano by the great Italian virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni. Organists do not play these works often. Brahms thought too much like a pianist to make it easy for organists to bring out the melodies he conceals in the inner voices.

Busoni solved that problem brilliantly and Jochum’s performance brought a kind of passionate serenity to Brahms’s complex textures.

Speaking of complex, Gunther Schuller turned Bach’s musical motto - B-A-C-H in German music terminology, B flat-A-C-B natural in ours - every which way in the first movement of his Sonata-Fantasia. The sounds of the work alternated crashing bells and ominously scurrying passages. The difference from Schuller to Bach was the difference between the painter Francis Bacon and Rembrant.

Jochum played the movement twice, the second time a bit less headlong than the first. Schuller’s sonorities reminded me of Scriabin’s piano writing - sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrifying - but sounds that stay with you long after the last note dies.

Jochum followed her exhuberant performance of Bach’s “Italian Concerto” with three encores, all in the key of F major - “Bach’s most joyous key,” Jochum said. Joy was the appropriate word for the occasion.