Byron Schenkman has long been a vital force in Seattle’s musical life. Here’s my Seattle Times story about the legacy of Byron Schenkman & Friends, which he founded ten years ago, and their latest project, a newly commissioned harpsichord concerto by Caroline Shaw. The world premiere takes place on tonight’s concert at 7pm:
You need to engage with the present if you really want to appreciate the musical past.
That, in a nutshell, is the premise underlying the latest program that the Seattle-based chamber music series Byron Schenkman & Friends will present on Sunday, March 26 at Benaroya Hall. Instead of merely repeating baroque masterpieces by J.S. Bach, the concert includes a contemporary counterpart tailor-made for Schenkman and his colleagues by the acclaimed American composer Caroline Shaw.
Soprano Amanda Forsythe sings Bach, with oboist Debra Nagy at left and Apollo’s Fire artistic director Jeannette Sorrell conducting from the harpsichord (all photos courtesy Apollo’s Fire)
I reviewedHeavenly Bach, Amanda Forsythe’s wonderful new release of Bach arias and cantatas with Apollo’s Fire, for Early Music America:
“Happiness writes white,” as the phrase goes—or, to borrow the formulation by Tolstoy that has become modernity’s default position: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Attempting to convey the condition of unadulterated joy in artistic terms is to risk a bland sentimentality; the bad news about the human condition is what sells. Part of J.S. Bach’s greatness lies in his ability to paint the full spectrum so convincingly, without compromise.
The incredible João Carlos Martins — a genuine cultural hero — celebrates the 60th anniversary of his debut at Carnegie Hall this evening at 7pm ET. He will lead NOVUS NY in a program combining Bach with music by the Brazilian composers Heitor Villa-Lobos and André Mehmari.
One of the great Bach interpreters at the keyboard, Martins shifted to conducting when it became no longer possible to continue his career as a concert pianist as a result of injuries and the condition of focal dystonia (which also affected the late Leon Fleisher). You can read in much greater detail here about the musician’s epic struggles and the love of music that has kept him going.
I had the honor of writing the program notes for his Carnegie Hall concert, which will present the following program:
J.S. Bach: Brandenburg Concertos 1 and 3 “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” from the Cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben BWV 147 (arranged by Heitor Fujinami)
HeitorVilla-Lobos Prelúdio from Bachianas BrasileirasNo. 4 W264 – 424
I reviewed the new Raphaël Pichon/Pygmalion recording of the St. Matthew Passion for Early Music America:
Perhaps the best way to adequately describe the extremely intense, 3-D quality of motion that Raphäel Pichon and the Pygmalion ensemble achieve in the St. Matthew Passion’s opening chorus is by way of comparison with another art: say, Stendhal’s description of the young Fabrizio caught up in the fog of Napoleonic battle in The Charterhouse of Parma (which Balzac praised as a marvel that “often contains a whole book in a single page”)….
If you haven’t yet experienced the Peter Sellars staging of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, I can’t recommend it highly enough — and the Berliner Philharmoniker production with Simon Rattle is currently available to view for free (until Monday) at the Digital Concert Hall.
Meanwhile, Bach’sSt. John Passion will be performed by John Eliot Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir, and the English Baroque Soloists. It can be viewed for a fee of 9.90 Euros on a Deutsche Grammophon Stage stream from the historic Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, starting at 3pm CET on Good Friday, 2 April.
Remarks Gardiner: “I look forward to this performance for DG Stage of Bach’s St John Passion. “I recorded the piece for the first time for Archiv Produktion back in 1986 and it remains truly special to me. Bach conceived the piece as much as an act of worship as a work of religious art. Almost 300 years after it was heard for the first time, it continues to move listeners of all faiths and none.”
And here’s a performance from 2019 of the 1725 version of the St. John Passion (available for the next 48 hours) from Solomon’s Knot: recorded live at the Nikolaikirche, Bachfest Leipzig, on 19 June 2019. Dramatization by John La Bouchardière.
Byron Schenkman & Friends presents an homage to the Thomaskirche Cantor with Happy Birthday, J.S. Bach! This concert features Joshua Romatowski on flute, Ingrid Matthews on violin, Caroline Nicolas on viol, and Byron Schenkman on harpsichord.
In addition to works by J.S. Bach, this program includes music composed around the time of his birth by Isabella Leonarda and Johann Kaspar Kerll.
This is a free digital concert and will be streamed at 7:00pm PST on Sunday, March 21, 2021; it will remain available at Byron Schenkman & Friends and on BS&F’s YouTube channel.
The video link above is to BS&F’s February concert, Piano Songs & Fantasies, which offered a remarkable program of Mozart, Teresa Carreño, Florence Price, Johannes Brahms, Margaret Bonds, Hale Smith, and Franz Schubert.
PROGRAM:
Johann Sebastian Bach: Sonata in D major, BWV 1028, for viol and harpsichord
Johann Kaspar Kerll: Passacaglia for harpsichord
Johann Sebastian Bach: Partita in A minor, BWV 1013, for flute
Isabella Leonarda: Sonata, op. 16, no. 12, for violin and continuo
Johann Sebastian Bach: Adagio Cantabile in G major, BWV 1019a, for violin and harpsichord
Happening today at 2pm EST from 92Y.
The concert stream will be available to ticket buyers (just $10) for one full week from the time of broadcast. View it live, or at your convenience.
The program:
Selected Three-Part Inventions (Sinfonias), BWV 787-801
French Suite No. 3. In D Minor, BWV 812
Partita No. 6 in E Minor, BWV 827
Italian Concerto in F Major, BWV 971
Currently touring the West Coast, the Danish String Quartet paid a visit recently. I now get what the fuss is about. Here’s my review for Strings:
The Danish String Quartet‘s contribution to the Beethoven 250 celebrations this season includes a tripartite North American tour. As part of the fall segment of this tour, which is currently underway, the Scandinavian foursome made a recent stop in Seattle. On offer was the first of the Beethoven-themed programs they are presenting under the project name PRISM. The performance launched this season’s International Chamber Music series at the Meany Center for the Performing Arts of the University of Washington.
Dmitri Sitkovetsky, Ayana Tsuji (winner of the 2016 first prize), Matt Haimovitz, and Kim Kashkashian at Maison symphonique (Concours musical international de Montréal)
From the Berlin Philharmonic’s program guide for St. Matthew Passion:
“Not all musicians believe in God, but they all believe in Johann Sebastian Bach,” said Mauricio Kagel, who grappled intensely with the life of the cantor at St. Thomas’s Church, plagued by bureaucratic city fathers and unmotivated Latin pupils, when he composed his own Passion. The term “Passion” is inextricably linked with the name “Bach”, first and foremost due to his St. Matthew Passion, already a work of superlatives in terms of its external dimensions.
That’s because the oratorio of the suffering and death of Christ, which in Bach’s lifetime eclipsed anything conceivable in the field of music, consists of no fewer than 68 individual movements (formerly counted as 78), which include, among others, the monumental opening chorus, the chorale setting “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünden groß” and the epic final chorus.
Already in the first version of the work from 1727 an extensive double choir setting of choir and orchestra is also required: the impressive stereophonic effects have lost none of their fascinating impact. (Bach himself demonstrably dared at a 1736 performance to separate the ensembles completely, enabling the real-spatial differentiation of the dialogue between the two vocal-instrumental ensembles.)
Starting off a week of festivities to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the opening of Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie, Sir Simon Rattle conducts Bach’s greatest passion music, together with the Rundfunkchor Berlin, boys from the Berlin Staats- und Domchor and a top-class ensemble of soloists. It is a work you can become addicted to, a work in which you can always discover something new even if you have listened to it repeatedly. This concert is also a feast for the eyes: as in April 2010, the St. Matthew Passion is performed in Peter Sellars’ unforgettable staging.
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 