Just as Johann Sebastian Bach spun several of his works around already existing themes and hymn tunes, composers of later eras enter into dialogue with Bach’s music.
Tine Thing Helseth. PHOTO: SIMAX
References and quotations are present in practically all music, far more frequently than we recognise. However, both the romantic concept of the artist as a genius and the modernist insistence upon innovation may both result in repeated music escaping our attention.
Andrew Manze, violinist and conductor, is among the foremost names in European early music. He is also closely linked with Norway, as the principal guest conductor of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and as a professor at the Norwegian National Academy of Music. The Swedish Chamber Orchestra has collaborated with him for over ten years. For the 2011 Bergen International Festival they have together compiled a programme of music which in one way or another is related to Bach, including music by the master himself.
Unpredictable and elegant
The concert opens with a composer who knew Bach well. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the best known of Johann Sebastian’s sons, is considered a kingpin in the transition from the Baroque to the Classical styles. His third F major symphony, which he wrote around the age of sixty, is a charming, elegant example of how he stretches and bends his music between balanced, restrained form and dramatic unpredictability. The fact that the symphony has three movements is a relic of baroque form. At the same time the work is full of melodic leaps, unexpected modulations, dissonances and harmonic progressions that remain suspended in the air.
From collage to trumpet concerto
The programme then leaps nearly two hundred years forward in time to the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, who was born in 1935. While studying composition and concurrently working in Estonian radio, he experimented for a while with twelve-tone music and serial techniques. His experiences from the radio studio may have been an influence in the 1960s, when he started trying out collage techniques. In his work Collage sür Bach from 1964 the presence of Bach is apparent both in direct quotations and in the three movements of the work. Thirty years later Pärt wrote a new version, in which he replaced the original oboe with a trumpet. Concerto piccolo über B-A-C-H from 1994, also in three movements, alternates between Bach quotations and a tighter, more modern harmonic base in the strings and keyboard. Pärt’s years of experience are clearly noticeable in the newer piece. Where the collage is marked by sharp, almost graphic shifts between melody lines and static clusters, the concerto has a more even flow of foregrounds and backgrounds and a well-defined distinction of roles between the soloist and the orchestra. Tine Thing Helseth joins the orchestra to play the trumpet part.
Classical form
Three-movement form also appears in Igor Stravinsky’s chamber concerto Dumbarton Oaks, written in 1937 for woodwinds, horn and strings. He wrote the work in Switzerland, where his daughter was dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium. He has been quoted as saying that he often heard Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos at this time of his life. Stravinsky’s own concerto is composed in contrapuntal style during his neoclassical period, when he often used classical form and existing music as a basis for his works. The instruments alternate between solo and ensemble, and the first movement contains parts of a theme from the third Brandenburg Concerto. The concerto is named after a property in Washington DC, owned by the man who commissioned the work.
The man himself
After Stravinsky we get to hear Johann Sebastian in the original. First a three-part ricercar and a sonata from The Musical Offering, a collection of pieces in various forms, all based on the same musical theme. The story goes that when King Fredrik II av Prussia employed CPE Bach as court musician, he challenged his new employee’s father with a theme which he considered difficult to improvise upon. JS Bach improvised a three-part fugue. The king countered with a challenge to extend the piece to six parts. Bach went home and returned with a complete score.
Andrew Manze and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra round off with the Brandenburg Concerto No 2 in F major. There are six Brandenburg Concertos in all, written some thirty years before the Musical Offering. In the second concerto a small concertino group of solo instruments – trumpet, violin, recorder and oboe – complements a string orchestra in a kind of concerto grosso.
Text: Hild Borchgrevink
English version: Roger Martin