Northwest BachFest concerts highlight diversity, talent of classical world, including cellist John-Henry Crawford and pianist Victor Santiago Asuncion

It is a fact both certain and inexplicable that some gifted musicians are able to impart a unique quality of tone to the sound of their instruments. This, reason tells us, is plainly impossible. A cellist, for example, employs a bow, which is no more than a band of horse hair stretched between two ends of a stick. How can such a thing transmit an audible character that is instantly identifiable as theirs? And yet, the audience at Sunday’s presentation by the Northwest BachFest heard two cellists – John-Henry Crawford and Zuill Bailey – who spoke and sang through the same centuries-old instrument in voices that were entirely different. In so doing, they were partnered by pianist Victor Santiago Asuncion, who animated the Yamaha at Barrister Winery with the very same unique voice we heard last when he last played for us there in the Spring of 2022.

The program was drawn from the works of seven composers, six of whom were born in Central or South America, and whose work has shaped the development of music in their native countries and its impact around the globe. They were all performed by the duo of Crawford and Asuncion. The seventh composer was the Italian-American Giancarlo Menotti, whose “Suite for Two Cellos and Piano” was the final, and most substantial piece on the program, and in which Zuill Bailey participated as both partner and (as he himself pointed out) competitor.

There was considerable variety within the selection of works by Latin American composers, though the attraction of sensuous melody prevailed, as it does in all three works we heard by the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos. His “Ondulando,” for example, justifies Crawford’s description of it as “Chopin with a Brazilian twist.” Later, “Pampamapa” by the Argentine Carlos Guastavino, recalled Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, wherein the lyrical voice of the piano subdues the harsh, dismissive growling of the orchestra. In Guastavino’s piece, eager, energetic outbursts from the piano are ultimately stilled by the quiet, soulful incantation of the cello.

On the strength of what we heard on Sunday, John-Henry Crawford is wonderfully well-equipped to render works of this character. His playing possesses an immediately attractive lyrical quality. This results from the uniformly warm, well-rounded tone he maintains throughout every register of the cello’s range, combined with a superb bowing technique, which allows him to differentiate phrases without once breaking the forward course of a melodic line. He showed less inclination to make wide variations in color, either within or between phrases. Coloristic variation, however, was supplied in abundance by Asuncion, who routinely achieved miracles of refined and imaginative coloration. To return, for example, to Villa-Lobos’ “Ondulando,” he supported the chaste beauty of Crawford’s playing with countless subtle shifts in color and intensity, each perfectly synchronized with changes in the cello’s melodic line.

As one would expect, the addition of Zuill Bailey to the ensemble enlarged its scope quite considerably. This was made all the more conspicuous by the fact that, during his participation in the Menotti Suite, he performed on the same cello – his own treasured 17th century masterpiece by Mateo Goffriller – that Crawford had used during the first portion of the program. Crawford, meanwhile, had switched to an extremely fine, carbon-fiber instrument which had been donated to the Northwest BachFest by benefactor Elizabeth Buxton.

Of course, Bailey has had many years to explore the resources of his magnificent instrument, and to learn best how to exploit them. Still, it was plain that his musical voice is simply different in character from Crawford’s, and, for that matter, from any other cellist’s one could mention. It is an essentially dramatic, rather than lyrical voice, one that insists that we listen, one that grabs us by the collar and says, “Wait … you’ve got to hear this!” Or, perhaps Al Jolson’s favorite line: “Hold on, hold on, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”

The broader palette of colors Bailey brought with him fulfilled the demands of Menotti’s “Suite for Two Cellos and Piano,” which proved to be something of a masterpiece, albeit not widely known. Masterfully constructed on a conspicuously Bachian foundation, the piece shows throughout Menotti’s complete command of how to write for both cello and piano, and to afford ever new ways for the three players to display their virtuosity.

During a pause in the program, a member of the audience who was attending a concert of Northwest BachFest for the first time was heard to say, not “What great music” or “What great playing,” but “What a great crowd!” In so doing, she showed herself caught up by the force of Zuill Bailey’s underlying motivation in his leadership of BachFest, as in his larger career as a musician: to demonstrate the power of music, not merely to entertain and divert, but to inspire, unify and heal. In truth, his goal is plainly evangelical: offering himself as both example and inspiration for the adoption of music as a vehicle of salvation, not from original sin, but from the forces in life that limit our vision, sap our energies and divert our attention from what is inclusive and uplifting to what is narrow, mean and divisive in the world around us.

Audiences at Bailey’s Northwest BachFest performances are not detached, censorious critics, but members of a cheering section drawing strength not only from what is onstage, but from everyone at their table, and all surrounding tables.

Until the mid-1970s, the classical music establishment was largely concerned with exalting the achievements of European musicians – all white, almost all male – in a way that denigrated the work of musicians of any other race, gender or locale. As exemplified by this weekend’s concerts of the Northwest BachFest, the situation today is entirely different, one could even say quite the opposite, with an emphasis on establishing connections between people of all types, backgrounds, beliefs and origins. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert are no less great today than they were 50 years ago; they simply have much more company on Mt. Olympus.