Bach fest pleasurably surprising

Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, like automobiles, comes in the luxury-car format, in big pieces such as the B minor Mass or the St. Matthew Passion, and in the economy model, such as the more modest-size keyboard works and chamber music. This year’s 29th Northwest Bach Festival featured the economy models. But the musical trip was an enormous pleasure.

This year’s festival took an unusual turn Saturday with a concert at the Spokane Club, which furnished “Bach With A Twist,” as the program title had it. Gunther Schuller, the festival’s artistic director is famous as a historian of jazz.

But the local leadership surprised Schuller by scheduling a musical match between harpsichordist Mark Kroll playing Bach straight and the Brent Edstrom Trio – Edstrom on piano, with bassist Brian Flick and drummer Rick Westrick providing the same music in a jazz version.

Before the classical listeners Saturday had a chance to cringe at the thought of such sacrilege, the players showed how vibrantly Bach’s music – in this case seven movements from the “Goldberg” Variations – could respond to such varied approaches. The modern Jazz Quartet’s John Lewis and his harpsichordist wife, Marijana, invented the chess match idea in the 1950s.

I was particularly intrigued at how easily Edstrom and his cohorts made the opening aria glide over Bach’s bass line, adopting a swing version of some of the original’s melodic figures. Kroll has been over this territory many times and was able to fill Bach’s virtuoso demands without flinching. And the Edstrom trio players, new to this game, fell right into line showcasing Bach’s melodic resources, whether in the piano part or in Flick’s solos in the bass’ high register. Westrick furnished quietly inventive ideas with brushes on the drums. This was chamber music that would have caused Bach to flash a surprised smile, just as others in the audience did.

Saturday’s program began and ended with soprano Tamara Schupman singing baroque arias with Kroll and cabaret songs by Kurt Weill with the trio. She has the personality of a cabaret singer though her pitch was often uncertain.

The festival ended Sunday in the Elizabethan Room of the Davenport Hotel with a rare opportunity to hear an instrument already going out of fashion in Bach’s time: the lute. At Sunday’s concert, it was in the hands of an exceptional master, Olav Chris Henriksen. Henriksen opened with a Prelude and Fantasie in C minor by Bach friend, Silvius Leopold Weiss. This was a beautifully expressive pair of pieces showed Weiss’s seemly improvisatory side in the Prelude and his more rigorous constructiveness in the Fantasie.

Bach, too, wrote a handful of lute pieces, perhaps inspired by Weiss’s skill and inventiveness. Henriksen chose the Suite in G minor which also exists as the Suite in C minor for Solo Cello. The contrast of the lute’s tender expressiveness make the cello version – which was performed at last year’s festival – seem very assertive, even aggressive.

After intermission, Kroll performed eight preludes from Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier.” He began with the Prelude in E-flat minor, a deeply expressive saraband that would have suited the sound of the lute. Kroll continued through a series that showed how easily Bach’s personality emerged.

The program ended with Georg Philipp Telemann’s Trio in G major for Harpsichord, Cello and Lute in which Kroll and Henriksen were joined by Spokane Symphony cellist John Marshall. Marshall and Kroll made the most of their dazzlingly, showy parts with Henriksen furnishing a subdued accompaniment. The trio rewarded the capacity audience – one of the most quietly attentive I’ve seen in a long time – with Ignaz Moscheles’ gloss on Bach’s Prelude No. 1 from the “Well-Tempered Clavier” with the keyboard part as Bach wrote it and a Schumann-like songful melody for the cello supported by bass murmuring from the lute. An extraordinary end to an unusual concert.