Day: April 25, 2018

The Feinstein Ensemble, Catherine Mason, Miki Takahashi, Sarah Moffatt (violins), Robin Bigwood (harpsichord), Martin Feinstein (flute, director)

Kings Place, 13th April 2018

JS Bach

• Triple Concerto in A minor for flute, violin & harpsichord BWV 1044
• Concerto in D minor for violin (reconstructed from BWV 1052)
• Concerto in F for harpsichord & two recorders BWV 1057
• Concerto in D for three violins (reconstructed from BWV 1064)

More Bach. Once again in the company of MSBD. Can you listen to too much JSB. Of course not. Mind you, you would have to if you ever wanted to get through all that he composed. Good luck with all those cantatas, chorales, songs, preludes, fugues, suites and toccatas. I will keep chipping away at the works for keyboards but, if I am honest, I think the solo string works and the concertos are enough to keep me satisfied.

Here we get a quartet of slightly less often performed concertos, composed in his maturity, when JSB was directing performances at the Collegium Musicum. That’s when he wasn’t occupied with composing music for his day jobs at four Leipzig churches. Three of the works are triple concertos, one reconfigured for 3 violins as opposed to 3 harpsichords and one single concerto for violin which was superseded by the harpsichord.

The first piece the Concerto in A minor for flute, violin and harpsichord in fact started life as two separate organ works, and is configured for the same orchestra as the Fifth Brandenburg even down to just having the three soloists play in the middle, slow movement (based on the organ sonata BWV 527). Moreover the harpsichord gets its own cadenza. the outer movement material is drawn from the Prelude and Fugue for A minor for harpsichord BWV 894 from 1717, and it is a lot less bright in mood that the Fifth Brandenburg. The outer two movements, marked allegro and presto, are complex even by JSB standards and. together, turn this into his longest concerto work. This was a big noise for just nine period instruments.

The harpsichord concerto in D minor BWV 1052 probably started out as a violin concerto, as we hear it here, witness the string-crossing formations in the first movement. This is unusual for having all three movements in minor keys. JSB’s use of riternello is most marked here.

The Concerto in F for harpsichord and two recorders is a subtle reworking of the Fourth Brandenburg in G major, with the solo violin part cleverly rewritten for the harpsichord and with the two recorders really coming to the fore.

As with the solo violin concerto the triple violin concerto in D was lost and only survived in the later harpsichord form. This has been reconstructed for the violins based on alterations made to the surviving score and it is a spectacular tour de force. Some of JSB’s stuff for multiple harpsichords can induce ear confusion I admit but not this work.  Hearing the melody lines played on shared violins, (above an often shared bass line), makes the work so much clearer.

Martin Feinstein, and his squad of crack Baroque musicians, are regulars at this venue, and he assembled a series of programmes here, alongside this, to celebrate the regular “Bach Weekend”. I am no flute expert but I would say Mr Feinstein knows where he is at on the pipes and his performance, alongside I think Catherine Manson on violin and Robin Bigwood on harpsichord, was thrilling, after a couple of minutes to get in the zone. Ms Manson took the lead for the solo violin concerto, with Emily Bloom joining Mr Feinstein for the recorder concerto. Ms Manson was joined by Miki Takahashi and Sarah Moffatt for the triple violin which was probably the highlight for me, although the two recorders ran it close, largely because I know the tunes.

The thing with JSB, as with Beethoven, is that the perfect logic and structure of the music makes you feel like you have heard it before and you know what is coming next. As it happens,, with JSB plundering his own back catalogue in this concertos, it is quite possible you have heard it before, but that is not what I mean. The instantaneous emotional joy is interlinked to the sustained intellectual pleasure. I still don’t really know what I am listening to in purely musical terms, all that counterpoint, harmonic and motivic organisation. I am though extremely grateful to all those Bach scholars, starting off with that nice Mr Felix Mendelssohn, who have got us to where we are now.

And to JSB himself for knowing that all those notes could, together, make these sounds. No Bach, no tonal system. No Bach, no modern instruments. No Bach, no instrumental solos.  Well maybe not entirely true, but his was the great leap forward in Western music. So kids, when you are listening to whatever Spotify chucks at you, and moving to the beat, you have JSB to thank.