Bach Festival: ‘Three Dancers’ a riveting new work

The roomy recesses of Barrister Winery were filled to overflowing with an audience eager to experience the second of the 2017 Northwest Bach Festival classics concerts.

Festival artistic director, cellist Zuill Bailey, and pianist Piers Lane bookended the evening’s music with two different versions of Frederic Chopin’s Introduction and Polonaise Brillante Op. 3. In Chopin’s original version, the young composer, eager to display his chops, nearly swamps the cello in a torrent of pianist display. Lane played as discretely as the music allowed him, but the extravagance of Chopin’s keyboard writing required that he dominate the stage. Even though he was forced to take a back seat to his colleague in technical display, Bailey left no doubt as to his command of his instrument, displaying from his first notes the uniquely penetrating musicality that has earned him a place on the list of the greatest artists ever to have taken it up.

The program closed with an “edition” of the Chopin piece by the legendary cellist Emmanuel Feuermann, who redistributed Chopin’s musical content, and contributed a significant bit of his own, to make the piece far better balanced. Here, Bailey surmounted Feuermann’s technical challenges with astonishing ease, even throwing in a few of his own. Underlying everything he did, however, was the eloquent lyricism that constitutes his unique voice and sets him in a class of his own.

To start the second half of the concert, Bailey and Lane collaborated in a remarkable performance of Beethoven’s Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 3 in A major Op. 69, a piece as vital, witty and fiercely imaginative as anything Beethoven ever wrote. The two musicians proved to be an ideal partnership, with each showing great individuality and engagement with the music, while dovetailing their parts into an immaculately finished whole. Bailey commands an extraordinarily wide dynamic range, observing Beethoven’s “subito piano” (suddenly soft) commands in a way that startles us, exactly as the composer must have intended. This was most evident in the last movement, Allegro Vivace, which the pair took at an amazing speed. They hurtled toward the conclusion without ever losing focus or blurring a phrase. Lane’s reading of the coda, both witty and mystical, was truly extraordinary, and helped bring down the house.

Fine as the Lane-Bailley collaboration was, the musical centerpiece of the evening was a performance of “The Three Dancers,” a riveting work of 2015 by Elena Kats-Chernin, who was born in Uzbekistan, and now resides in Australia. Inspired by a 1930 painting of the same name by Pablo Picasso, the piece calls for five players in addition to piano and cello: violin (Tana Bachman Bland), double bass (Eugene Jablonsky), accordion (Patricia Bartell), soprano saxophone (Christopher Parkin), and percussion (Marty Zyskowski).

Terrific virtuosity is demanded of every player, though there are no spotlighted star turns, as in the Chopin and Beethoven. Rather Kats-Chernin combines the sounds of the instruments in novel and striking ways, creating composite tones that she uses to explore the powerful implications of Picasso’s painting. At one point, for example, Bartell’s matchless accordion playing is blended with ghostly high harmonics from Bachman Bland’s violin to create an effect both beautiful and sinister. This is in keeping with the back-story of the painting, which involves a love triangle leading to murder-suicide.

“The Three Dancers” is characterized by a stylistic fingerprint that appears in the opening bars: an insistent rhythmic figure repeated metronomically, upon which the composer superimposes slow, fragmentary phrases that strain toward, but never quite achieve, the form of melody. The presence of the accordion immediately suggests the cafes of Paris, over which the dolorous voice of the double-bass introduces a note of dark lyricism. The piece is full of such complex moments; in fact, it is comprised of them. Its dominant tone is one of grim anxiety, but the flashes of gaiety and tenderness prevent even a hint of monotony.

The program booklet assures us that further familiarity with “The Three Dancers” will reveal a tightly-woven structure in nine parts, knit together by signature note-clusters representing five characters in the tragic story. To achieve this familiarity will require repeated hearings, which, if one can judge from the standing ovation that greeted the conclusion of the piece, is just what the audience wants.