Bach Festival starts with a slight detour

The Northwest Bach Festival took a French turn as it began its 27th season over the weekend. Organist James David Christie showed the spectacular side of 19th-century organ music on the festival’s opening concert at St. John’s Cathedral Saturday, and four of the festival vocal soloists provided the contrasting meditative side of the French musical coin.

On Sunday, Gunther Schuller, the festival’s artistic director, introduced the festival audience to Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Les Indes Galantes,” the first Spokane performance I can remember of any dramatic work by Bach’s French contemporary. Sunday’s performance concluded with highly dramatic performances of five arias by Handel.

It seemed at first a little unnerving to have a Bach Festival begin without a note of Bach’s, but the detour through Paris and London was well worth the sacrifice.

Christie prefaced his performance Saturday by saying, “For the first time since I have been coming to Spokane, I am playing no baroque music. But one of my great loves has always been the French romantic organ literature, and that music is beautifully suited to the organ here at St. John’s.”

The 19th-century French pipe organ isn’t referred to as the “symphonic organ” for nothing. Its tonal palette is rich with color and it can roar or whisper with equal ease.

Christie opened with Cesar Franck’s Organ Chorale in A minor, whose opening stacks one note on another until the church and the ear are shatteringly full, then dissolves that sound into a swirl of running figuration.

Christie ended the concert with the finale to Alexandre Guilmant’s Sonata in D major, whose blazing climax exploited the organ’s state trumpet pipes at the rear of the cathedral.

The organ work on the program not only displayed grandeur and speed, but songfulness and wit, too, in works from Franck and Guilmant to Jehan Alain and Langlais.

I couldn’t help smiling at the quirky accents punctuating a continuous fast moving blur of notes in the inner part of Albert Alain’s Scherzo in a style very close to Mendelssohn’s, but with a dollop of tart French sauce.

Christie was joined by soprano Janet Brown, mezzo-soprano Barbara Rearick, tenor Rockland Osgood and baritone James Maddalena in a program that included eight short motets by Faure, Saint-Seans and Poulenc and a very brief Mass by Jehan Alain. The beautiful little works are rarely performed in the United States.

All four soloists showed great aptitude for the French vocal style, a cool sweetness which allowed each to project the quiet fervency of these tiny masterpieces.

The singers were joined by two excellent young performers – violinist Stephanie Tintinger and flutist Jonathan Westfield – who played instrumental obbligatos in motets by Faure, Tournemire and Alain.

Schuller opened Sunday’s performance with Rameau’s Overture to his ballet “Zais.” “It is the earliest work I know that opens with a bass drum solo,” Schuller told the Met audience.

The barely audible rumble of the bass drum is followed with disconnected snatches representing chaos that only gradually take on clear form. It was a brilliant tour de force of orchestration which came off a bit tentatively Sunday, but nonetheless showed what an inventive orchestral thinker Rameau was, as well as Schuller’s inventiveness in programming Rameau in this festival.

The centerpiece of Sunday’s program was “The Incas of Peru,” the second entree from Rameau’s opera-ballet “Les Indes Galants.” The plot is … well, thin and all too obvious – a love triangle involving an evil Inca priest of the sun, the European good guy conquistador, and the innocent Inca princess they both desire.

Brown, Osgood and Maddalena brought the same fine singing and elegance of style they had shown in Saturday’s concert. And Schuller showed a light touch with Rameau’s orchestral evocation of the Peruvian forest and the dances of the worshippers of the sun, and unleashed two orchestral outbursts as a volcano explodes not once, but twice. The work was sung in English in Schuller’s serviceable translation, but there was really no help for Louis Fuzilier’s feeble story. Rameau’s music said brilliantly everything that needed to be said.

Saturday’s performance ended with five arias by Handel, internationally the most famous of Bach’s contemporaries. Practically everyone knows of the beauty and vigor of Handel’s melodies. But, under Schuller’s baton, Rearick and Maddalena showed just how powerfully dramatic they were, whether in the blissful ease of Rearick’s “Ombra mai fu” or in Maddalena’s sizzling “The Trumpet Shall Sound.” Both performers (and trumpet player William Berry) added a tasteful amount of ornamentation. And Schuller brought out the clarity and dramatic quality of the orchestral parts, as we have come to expect.