Lenox — The Berkshire Bach Society joins forces with the Tanglewood Learning Institute (TLI) for “BBS Portals: Bach & Friends,” an afternoon of music and film at 3 p.m. on Saturday, November 8, in Studio E at the Linde Center for Music and Learning. The event features the acclaimed documentary “Bach & Friends,” a celebration of the composer’s enduring influence through interviews with musical luminaries. Pianist Simone Dinnerstein and BBS Artistic Director and violinist Eugene Drucker open the program with a live performance and then invite audience members to join a post-screening conversation about their personal journeys with Bach. The program runs approximately two and a half hours, including one intermission.
I spoke with Eugene Drucker last week via Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Gene, you’ve spent much of your career performing Bach’s music, both solo and with the Emerson String Quartet. What first drew you personally to Bach’s sound world?
I remember playing at least one movement of the Bach Double Concerto with my father when I was 11 years old at the nursing home where my grandmother, his mother, was staying toward the end of her life. Even then, I might not have been able to express it in words, or even in my own mind, I might not have been able to define what it was that drew me in about Bach’s music particularly. But there was something. It’s depth, it’s complexity.
Complexity isn’t always complex—I don’t want to scare people away. There’s also a touching simplicity about some of his music. The beauty of the melodic lines and the richness of the harmonies, and of course, the counterpoint, the way the lines interweave with each other.
Again, I don’t think I could have expressed that in as many words when I was 11 years old, but I continued, at around that age, having begun studying violin when I was eight years old with the unaccompanied works.
The E Major Partita and the G Minor Sonata were the first solo Bach works that I learned—and then, I guess a little bit later, the violin concertos.
Then, as time went on, I had the privilege of playing the ‘Erbarme dich’ solo from St. Matthew Passion. That was not part of a complete performance of St. Matthew Passion, but it was part of a Sunday church series. It’s the only chance I’ve actually had to play that; though in my mid-20s with Musica Sacra under the direction of Richard Westenburg, I played the other violin solo in that oratorio, the ‘Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder,’ because I was concert master of the second orchestra.
So I played that piece three consecutive Easters in my mid-20s. And what I often said at the time—and I still refer back to it—was that even though I’m a secular Jewish guy, at that moment, on stage for those three-plus hours, I totally subscribed to the beliefs embodied in that music, or I suspended my disbelief in the best sense of the term.
On November 8, TLI will screen the film ‘Bach & Friends.’ Were there any particular performances in the film that surprised you or offered you a new perspective on Bach?
Yes, probably, but my memory of it is not that specific. The film was made about 15 years ago, and I saw the scenes in which we were involved probably several times. And I saw the whole film once or twice after that. I’m looking forward to rewatching it.
I remember that the final sequence, which we were lucky enough to be involved in, was absolutely stunning visually, because the film director was looking for different takes on Bach, really, from people who played all sorts of instruments, who came from all sorts of musical backgrounds—and also some people from not particularly musical backgrounds.
There was a medical researcher who performed an MRI on a musician who could improvise in the style of Bach. He was given some kind of keyboard that made a little bit of sound, and he was then pulled into the tube for the MRI.
He was asked first to play the Minuet in G, and then he was asked to improvise. And what the neuroscientist discovered was that there was a completely different part of the brain involved in improvisation from the part involved in playing a piece that he knew Bach wrote.
I kind of wished that the pianist had been given a more challenging work than the Minuet in G—something like the aria of the ‘Goldberg Variations’—or had chosen another piece in G major just to make sure about the results, to make sure that in a more complex work the same results would stand, that there was blood flow in one area of the brain for playing a piece that you’ve studied, and a completely different area of the brain for making the music up on the spot at the moment.
But the sequence that we were a part of toward the end of the film involved mathematicians who specialized in fractals: the idea that certain patterns repeat themselves on ever more microscopic levels when you really study phenomena in biology and other scientific disciplines. And so there was an almost psychedelic sequence at the end, where we were playing one of the fugues from ‘Die Kunst der Fuge,’ ‘The Art of Fugue,’ and the camera was approaching a multicolored background full of swirls and other kinds of shapes.
And as we continue to play and the music gets more complex, you feel as if the camera sort of breaks through the barrier of the surface and continues finding new surfaces behind that surface. I’ve never seen anything like that in a film. And to think that, not only was it music by Bach, but that it was our playing of the Bach in this extremely creative use of the visual means of film. I continue to find that very impressive.
And they have people like Béla Fleck, a ukulele player, a banjo player, all talking about their own personal relationship to Bach, even though they weren’t that involved with classical music.
Would bluegrass mandolinist Chris Thile be an example?
Yes, Chris Thile and Béla Fleck. Also Jake Shimabukuro, who plays ukulele. Of course, there was a guitarist, but that’s a little more within the realm of expectation—of guitarists playing some of the string unaccompanied music, or sometimes a keyboard suite. And I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. Also, there’s a sequence with The Swingle Singers.
So the feeling you get from the film is that Bach’s music provides a kind of common ground, where people from widely disparate backgrounds, kinds of training, and musical preferences can unite in appreciation of what Bach’s music has to offer.
As someone who has lived inside the classical tradition, how do you feel Bach’s language speaks to artists beyond classical music? You sort of touched on that just now.
I think that, as with much Baroque music, there’s an irresistible rhythmic drive in the fast movements that draws people in. People love Vivaldi for the same reason—and some listeners, especially those on the periphery, might even prefer Vivaldi, since his music isn’t quite as complex as Bach’s.
I think it will continue to surprise people who are willing to open themselves up to the experience, because there’s a sort of cliche about Bach, that his music is so highly structured and kind of mathematical. And people use that term as a way of distancing themselves from it, saying, ‘Oh, well, that’s very cerebral and intellectual.’
Well, yes, there is that side of Bach’s genius, but there is a deeply emotional component in most of the music that he wrote. Also, sometimes the music is fun. We’re going to have a film later on in the series, in late March, called ‘In the Key of Bach,’ which really brings out the humor in a piece like the ‘Coffee Cantata,’ for example.
The breadth of Bach’s musical vision—and of his personality—really comes through in the offerings we’re presenting to audiences in our Portals series. And we’re not just pleased; we’re honored to collaborate with the Tanglewood Learning Institute on these presentations. We have a couple of events taking place elsewhere, but it’s wonderful to continue this partnership—one that began through the ongoing connection between our executive director, Terrill Mcdade, and [TLI Production Manager] Mark Rulison. I remember a very cold morning last January when we had coffee together in Lenox, and we began to kick around some of these ideas.
For me, Tanglewood has been a place where I’ve been learning since I was 16 years old. That’s my first connection to the Berkshires. I came to what’s now called the TMC. At the time, it was the Berkshire Music Center.
When I was 18, I had these magnificent transformative experiences, not only with the music of Bach, or actually very little with the music of Bach, or the Baroque period, but the idea of a learning institute—and I know that Tanglewood is not the only institution that offers this idea of continuing education—but I’ve continued, or at least I’ve tried to continue learning throughout my life and my career as a musician. And my recurrent engagement with Baroque music definitely has its focal point geographically in the Berkshires, because I’ve been playing with the Berkshire Bach Society almost since it was founded.
I can measure it easily because my son, who’s now 31, was an infant at the time.
My first couple of visits up there were when my wife Roberta Cooper was playing cello in the smaller ensemble on weekends in the fall of 1994. I came along for the right to take care of our son. And then I think it was that New Year’s time when I began to participate, playing some of the solo parts, as well as the tutti parts in the Brandenburg Concertos under the inspired direction of Ken Cooper, who was my predecessor, music director of the New Year’s concerts.
So, I have a feeling of so many points of contact with Tanglewood, with the Berkshires in a larger sense, and well… with the music of Bach primarily.
It was just last Sunday, I led the Westchester Philharmonic in kind of demanding programs, both of the Bach violin concertos, the Haydn C Major concerto, and Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, which is Rudolf Barshai’s transcription of the eighth string quartet.
That’s a piece I know very, very well. And so, even in the eighth string quartet, there are a number of characteristics that remind me of Bach, because it begins and ends with a slow fugue.
Shostakovich incorporated his own initials, DSCH, in German transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet, but also in German musical notation in the sense that S is E flat—what we call E flat in English—and H is what we call B.
Bach himself did the same thing in a number of his fugues—including one of the subjects of the final entry in ‘The Art of Fugue,’ a fugue based on the notes B, A, C, H, which to us correspond to B-flat, A, C, and B-natural. And it’s so powerful because, for an extra-musical reason, Bach never completed that fugue and breaks off in mid-phrase. Some people have tried to complete it, but when the Emerson Quartet played the ‘The Art of Fugue’ and we recorded it in a string quartet transcription—which works very well for quartet, by the way—it was always a very dramatic ending, because the music builds up in intensity.
That final fugue was intended to be a quadruple fugue: in other words, four huge sections. But he never got to the end of it. And you sense that this is a summation of a life’s work, written when he was going blind and approaching the end of his life. And then, the fact that it was incomplete gave rise to a rumor that might be apocryphal: that Bach died in mid-phrase.
I don’t think that’s really true, but his son Carl Phillip Emmanuel kind of promulgated that rumor in the first edition of ‘The Art of Fugue,’ which was printed I think about a year after Johann Sebastian Bach died. Carl Phillip Emanuel said, ‘The composer died at this moment.’ So that gave rise to the rumor. I don’t know whether he was there. After all, he lived in Berlin, where he was the Kapellmeister to Frederick the Great, and I’m not sure if he was there when his father passed away.
But the point is that Bach’s energies were waning. He had to dictate some of his final works to a student. If you can imagine, works of that that complexity, to dictate, what you’re carrying in your head, the crystallization of musical ideas and different layers of compositions all in your head, you can’t see anymore, and you’re dictating that to a talented student, trusting him with part of your legacy. It’s an amazing thought.
And so all I can tell you is, from numerous times when the Emerson performed, that it was a very powerful moment, after like 45 minutes of playing about 50 or 60 percent of ‘The Art of Fugue.’ We almost never played the entire thing, but we adapted it for our concert purposes.
And when we came to the end, I’m sure that Bach did not intend for that final phrase in the alto voice to draw a dramatic effect by breaking off in the middle. There’s something much more modern in our sensibilities, and we find aesthetic satisfaction in the very incompleteness of it.
But that’s an example of the way in which Bach’s music—sort of like Shakespeare’s works—continues to resonate through the centuries. And each new age will find relevance in its own way in this great legacy that he left us.
