Bach Festival opens with encore-worthy show

The 28th Northwest Bach Festival took off in high spirits in the Davenport Hotel’s Marie Antoinette Room on Sunday afternoon with or without the music of J.S. Bach (more about that later).

For such high spirits to come across to the audience, the performers need to be in a festive mood. And Sunday’s quartet of performers – violinists Misha Rosenker and Kelly Farris, viola da gambist Margriet Tindemans, and harpsichordist Mark Kroll – clearly had a good time in one another’s company.

Rosenker, the newcomer to this year’s festival, has a boyish, mischievous look about him that belies phenomenal technique and fine musicianship. He is clearly a welcome addition to the festival roster and to Spokane’s musical community.

The afternoon began in Italian with a Spanish accent as Farris, Tindemans and Kroll played Domenico Scarlatti’s “Sonata in D minor for Violin and basso continuo.” Scarlatti was Italian, the son of a famous opera composer, who grew up in Spanish-governed Naples and spent most of his career at the royal courts of Portugal and Spain. Though famous for his more than 500 sonatas for solo harpsichord, Scarlatti also wrote a handful of sonatas for violin with harpsichord and a bass instrument.

Farris and his partners brought out the tart rhythmic spiciness that Scarlatti’s biographer Ralph Kirkpartick called “the onions, garlic and peppers” in his music.

Rosenker joined Farris, Tindemans and Kroll for the lighthearted but cumbersomely titled “Deuxieme Recreation de Musique d’une execution facile” by Jean-Marie Leclair. The performers dealt with Leclair’s musical sport like a game of badminton doubles as short musical motifs flew from one performer to the other. The “Badinage” movement seemed only a step or two away from a hoe-down.

The four performers addressed more serious business in Francois Couperin’s “La Francaise.” The work opens with respectful tribute by its French composer to the Italian Archangelo Corelli. Couperin follows his imitation of a Corelli-style sonata with seven very French dances, their melodies organized in highly ornamented short sentences. It was easy to hear why J.S. Bach was a great admirer of Couperin, though their musical language is as different as the crisp clarity of French is from the rambling complexity of German.

The program’s final work was of debatable origin, “Trio Sonata in C major,” once thought to be by Bach. Most scholars now think it is the work of J.G. Goldberg. Whether Goldberg was a pupil of Bach is a matter of debate.

Farris, Rosenker, Tindemans and Kroll played the work as though there were no doubt of its Bachian credentials. They brought an easy clarity to the fugue of the second movement and a witty liveliness to its final gigue.

The four returned to the stage for an encore, Leclair’s “Le Tambourin,” a work that showed the 18th century Frenchman’s inclination to country fiddling as the “Deuxieme Recreation” heard earlier in the evening.