Great Barrington — The illustrious Bach family took center stage at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center Saturday, March 19, in the season’s latest offering from the Close Encounters With Music (CEWM) series. The ACRONYM Baroque String Band and CEWM Artistic Director Yehuda Hanani presented an eclectic program titled “J.S. Bach & Sons — Legitimate and Otherwise” that included works ranging from the popular to the obscure to the absurd. The result was both enlightening and entertaining.
Heinrich Bach’s Sonata in F Major provided a natural introduction to the evening’s program. Few have even heard of J.S. Bach’s uncle Heinrich (1615-1692), but he was a career organist and a significant composer of chorales, motets, concertos, preludes, and fugues. Only five of his compositions are extant. His Sonata in F Major may not be quite on par with this nephew’s work, but it is beautiful music. More importantly, Heinrich’s works provide an enlightening glimpse into a little-known period in the Bach family’s nearly 200-year musical history, and they reveal much about Johann Sebastian’s instincts as a composer. Heinrich’s Sonata in F is a perfect example of the kind of long-forgotten music the ACRONYM players glory in. They’ve made it their mission to unearth such works for the purpose of revealing them to the world, and the ensemble’s reputation attests to their success in doing so.
Next on the program, fugues by Johann Sebastian’s sons, Johann Christoph Friedrich and Wilhelm Friedmann, preceded Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Württemberg Sonata #1 in A Minor. The ACRONYM players are obviously at home with this music.
Everything up to this point in the program had proceeded just as we would expect. However, what no one could possibly have anticipated — neither the Mahaiwe audience nor anyone living in the 18th-century — was the unprecedented genius of the great patriarch, Johann Sebastian Bach. Forget the technicalities: The sheer pleasure J.S. Bach’s music brings to both expert and novice listeners is as inexplicable as it is sublime.
Of all the pieces on Saturday’s program, J.S. Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto” No. 3 and his Concerto for Violin and Oboe shine the brightest light on ACRONYM’s strengths as a baroque ensemble. The players’ mastery of these classic pieces was made manifest on Saturday by the group’s exemplary ensemble playing: If you closed your eyes, you’d swear they had a conductor. And they’re famous for this. They communicate with one another so well in performance that from their body language alone one gets a clear sense of the group’s feelings and intentions. It’s well known that when Bach himself conducted these pieces, he employed the very best musicians available. Violinist Edwin Huizinga and oboist James Austin Smith are players of such rank. Both turned in exhilarating virtuoso performances on the Concerto for Violin and Oboe, earning the loudest cheers of the evening.
P.D.Q. Bach, a comically erudite creation of the brilliant Peter Schickele, made a very brief appearance after intermission. His “Trumpet Involuntary from ‘Iphigenia in Brooklyn’ S. 53162 for Strings, Continuo, and Solo Wine Bottle” elicited both guffaws and applause from a crowd that surely would have loved to hear more from the 21st of J.S. Bach’s 20 sons.
Henri Casadesus’ “Concerto for Viola in C Minor in the style of Johann Christian Bach (1735-1772), arr. for violoncello 1948,” a piece long attributed to Johann Christian Bach himself, was a smart addition to this mostly-Bach program. This is a challenging concerto for any cellist, and Yehuda Hanani seemed to struggle with it at times. Still, his performance was heartfelt, self-assured, and imbued with an urgency that gave the piece an almost Romantic-era sensibility. The crowd roared its approval.
