On Tuesday afternoon I walked down to Juilliard to hear a violin recital given by the students of Lewis Kaplan. The program, a windfall for anyone with an interest in Baroque music, consisted of the complete Sonatas and Partitas of J.S. Bach.
The Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001–1006) were composed over a number of years and completed by 1720; they remained unpublished, however, until 1802, Though we in the twenty-first century are accustomed to thinking of Bach as the greatest of the Baroque composers, a giant whose work is as essential a part of the repertoire as that of Mozart and Beethoven, that sad truth is that he was largely forgotten by the public for a century after his death. These pieces might very well have been lost in the eighty odd years that elapsed between their composition and publication if the autographs had not been passed down within the Bach family to grandson Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach. It was only when the virtuoso Joseph Joachim began playing them regularly in his recitals that their true value at last came to be recognized.
Compositions for solo violin were not Bach's invention. He had a number of precedents in the works of such well know composers as H.I.F. Biber and Johann Georg Pisendel. The most immediate influence on Bach, though, may have been the solo partitas of Johann Paul von Westhoff, a composer with whom Bach had actually worked while in Weimar. But certainly Bach raised the genre to an entirely new level and in so doing revealed possibilities for the instrument that modern composers are still exploiting. The absence of accompaniment, or continuo, meant that the violin writing was forced to take on added complexity in order to make up for this lack of additional instrumentation and to necessarily become polyphonic so as to make the composition whole.
The works were not performed in catalog order at this recital as they usually are. When at intermission I spoke with Mr. Kaplan and asked him if there were a reason for this, he mentioned that some of the musicians were also performing in an opera being staged at Juilliard that same evening and needed to play their pieces first. Each work was divided among several violinists, with each playing one or two movements and their place then taken by another performer.
In the order of appearance, the first work was the Sonata No. 1 in G minor, BWV 1001. The adagio and allegro were performed by Erika Mitsui and the siciliana and presto by Agnes Tse. Next was the Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004 with Leerone Hakami playing the allemanda and corrente, Haemin Lee the sarabanda and giga, and Iris Chen the famous ciaconna. This was followed by the Partita No. 1 in B minor BWV 1002 which is distinguished by having four pairs of movements. In this work each movement has its own variation, or double, played at a much faster speed than the original. James Luo performed the allemanda and corrente and their doubles, and Seohee Min the sarabande and tempo di borea (a form of bourée) and their doubles.
The first piece to be performed after intermission was the Sonata No. 2 in A minor, BWV 1003 whose grave and fuga were played by Lifan Zhu and the andante and allegro by Chisa Kodaka. Next was the Sonata No. 3 in C major, BWV 1005. The adagio and fuga were played by Momo Wong and the largo and allegro assai by Gabrielle Chou. Finally, the recital ended with the Partita No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006. Daniel Yue played the preludio and loure, Momo Wong the gavotte en rondeau and the menuets, and Lifan Zhu the bourée and gigue.
It goes without saying that the Bach solo violin works are among the most demanding in the violin repertoire. There are any number of double and triple stops contained in these works and advanced bowing techniques are required. I was incredibly impressed by the virtuosity of the Juilliard musicians who performed these works so admirably at Tuesday's recital.
No comments:
Post a Comment