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Doors Open!
Festival Concert 3
August 17, 2021
Tuesday
One-hour concert at Lincoln Theater
4:00 pm – Socially distanced seating with limited capacity; masks required. Tickets must be purchased in advance.
7:30 pm - General admission / open seating; masks requested. Tickets available in advance or at the door.
PROGRAM - 4:00 pm
Johann Sebastian Bach
Partita No. 2 in D minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1004
Sonata No. 3 in C major for Solo Violin, BWV 1005
Partita No. 3 in E major for Solo Violin, BWV 1006
Jennifer Koh, violin
PROGRAM - 7:30 pm
Johann Sebastian Bach
Sonata No. 1 in G minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1001
Partita No. 1 in B minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1002
Sonata No. 2 in A minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1003
Jennifer Koh, violin
Artists
Jennifer Koh, violin
Please note: All ticket sales are nonexchangeable and nonrefundable.
Jennifer Koh’s performance is sponsored by Randy Phelps & Pamela Daley.
This concert is sponsored by Randy Phelps & Pamela Daley.
Pre-Concert Lecture by Mark Mandarano:
PROGRAM NOTES
by Mark Mandarano
The following is an excerpt from Ms. Koh’s artistic statement for her Bach and Beyond program, wherein Bach’s solo violin works are juxtaposed with newly commissioned works for solo violin.
The six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin by Bach have long been considered definitive works for solo violin. While exploring the history of solo violin works written from Bach’s time to the present day, I have found direct and indirect connections to Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas in nearly every composition I have uncovered. Although written nearly 300 years ago, they have proven to be a summit for composers and violinists today and throughout Western classical music history.
I have come to understand Bach’s complete works for solo violin as a musical journal of his life and development as an artist. Bach’s second and third sonatas contain fugues that expand upon the one in his first sonata in both size and motif. This form reaches its apex in the C major fugue of the third sonata, Bach’s largest movement in all his works for solo violin and a testament to the form’s architectural possibilities.
I have always believed that music is a direct conversation and reflection of the world in which we live. Having grown up in a time when people have declared classical music to be a dead art form, I have found it necessary to understand why I am committed to this art form and why I believe classical music is relevant and meaningful to present society.
-Jennifer Koh
As foundational as Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin may seem in our own age, there was nearly a century between the time they were written and when they were rediscovered and became incorporated into the repertory. Originally composed around 1720, it wasn’t until 1840, in Leipzig, that violinist Ferdinand David (1810–73) first performed in public the Chaconne (or Ciaccona) from the Partita No. 2 in D minor. Perhaps one of the great ironies of music history is that, for the premiere of this important solo work, Robert Schumann played a piano accompaniment he had composed for the performance.
Immediately it was recognized as a watershed moment for violin performance and for composition. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported that:
…one sees with some surprise that most things to which modern virtuosi attend in order to excite and to amaze the public were in reality invented long ago, actually that violin playing in Bach’s time already had reached an astonishing height. … Indeed, [this performance of] the Chaconne involved a far greater mastery of playing and far more competent artistry than the performance of many of the most famous modern virtuoso pieces.
The pieces were subsequently taken up by the most important violinist of his era, Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) (who performed them unaccompanied). From that point on, they were not only a regular part of concert life, they were recognized as the fons et origo of music for violin. As Johannes Brahms would write, “on one staff, for one small instrument, this man has written a whole world of profoundest thought and deepest feelings.”
Which raises the question of why? Is there a reason why this music, in particular, should be held in such regard? The question is, of course, unanswerable, except possibly through a brilliant performance of the notes themselves. But one thing that certainly contributes to this sense is the impression that, as a group of pieces, there is something so comprehensive and exhaustive about the enterprise, something that gives the feeling that every last potentiality was revealed and illuminated. The music, with its wealth of divergent ideas and moods, underpinned by a deep understanding and consciousness, presents us with a vision of a universal, cohesive order to the cosmos. It is a philosophical outlook second nature to Bach which is, to a large degree, lost to our modern moment. In fact, for many, the music of Bach is the closest thing they have ever felt to an experience of the divine!
There may also be, in the tension between restriction and freedom, a metaphor for the state of mankind. Bounded by the limits of what’s physically possible for one player, with four strings and within the limits of understandable formal structures, Bach creates music that represents “a whole world.” Just as humans are bound within the limits of a body and residing for a time in a world filled with limitations, the spirit can soar to limitless heights and the mind can grasp the very foundations of the universe.
Structurally, each of the Sonatas is in four movements, with a slow, expressive opening followed by a fugue, a slow movement, and a brisk finale. The Partitas have more of the flavor of a suite, with a sequence of four to six movements in traditional Baroque dance forms.
The First Sonata, in G minor, makes clever use of the violin’s lowest open strings as the basis for harmonic movement on the tonic (G) and the dominant (D). In the opening Adagio, one hears the composer of cantatas bringing to bear all of his knowledge of vocal line and dependence on harmonic accompaniment into this piece of instrumental music. This sense of line, of sighing suspensions, of ascending passages that cry out in hope and despair, is captured in this aria, with intelligent, sensitive, active harmonic interaction at every key moment of the progress. To write a fugue for a solo non-keyboard instrument could be perceived as an exercise in overstatement. After all, how can what is traditionally a single-line instrument carry out not only the ongoing harmonic processes demanded by a fugue, but also the counterpoint of independent and motivically developed voices? Right from the beginning, in the first three measures of this fugue, Bach requires the player to astound the listener with the entrances of three independent statements of the fugue subject, on the primary pitch, then a fifth below, and finally a fourth above, to inaugurate what is indeed a three-voiced fugue, almost as intricate as one from The Well-Tempered Clavier and much more demanding for the performer. Bach honors the fugal structure of alternating episodic passages, including showy arpeggiated sequences that modulate freely, with motivically derived statements of the main fugue subject, in counterpoint with other voices in two, three, and four stops. In the final measures the improvisatory spirit takes hold to allow an independent, expressive voice to soar. The third movement is a characteristic dance, the Siciliana, with its dotted rhythm in triple time. The finale is a dazzling Presto, the superabundance and brilliance and ever-proliferating miracle of nature flowering forth in the nearly unstoppable flow of passagework from the soloist.
In Partita No. 1 in B minor, each dance movement is followed by a Double, which, while not exactly a variation on the preceding movement, is a more lightly textured, less ornamented successor, almost an alternative conclusion based on the same premises as the preceding, more weighty version. The Partita in B minor opens with a highly ornamented Allemande, with dotted rhythms throughout. It is followed by a Corrente (Courante), steadily in three. The Sarabande follows, stately and serious with weighty chords usually on the first two beats of each bar. The finale is a Borea or Bourrée, a moderately quick dance in two, with a single pick-up and a strong metrical accent (on the two beats of the bar).
Sonata No. 2 is in A minor, in which the absence of the open lower strings as a part of the core harmony gives the music a different center of gravity as compared to Sonata No. 1. The hue of the music is less gravid and, while remaining serious, takes a more straightforward, less rhetorical stance. Once again, we begin with a singing, expressive prelude (marked Grave) that leads to a fugue, which is once again a marvel of implications for multi-voiced texture. One technique to note in this movement is the use of bariolage, or the alternation between fingered notes on one string with the adjacent open string, exploiting not only the interaction between a kind of pedal pitch on the open string and a moving line, but also the difference in tone color between the two strings (and between a string that is fingered and the more raw sound of an open string, with the fingered pitch sometimes being the exact same as the open string, thereby working with the difference in color alone). This is something we will see to a much greater degree in the Chaconne of Partita No. 2, where, indeed, the open string alternates with double stops on the two strings below and in Partita No. 3, where it features prominently in the mercurial opening movement. In the Andante, the violin produces a kind of basso continuo line in steady eighth notes throughout, giving the measured pace of this music a heartbeat and a certain stateliness. The finale seals the mood of this Sonata as one of the more straightforward with very clear phrase structure, moments of literal repetition with opportunities for an “echo” effect, and clear sequencing, giving the mind the satisfaction of following sturdy musical logic.
Partita No. 2 is probably the most recognizable of these works, but familiarity robs it of none of its awe-inspiring power and magnificence. It can be difficult to articulate in words what may lie behind what many of us simply hear as the ultimate, the fundamental, the essence of “music,” a succession of sounds that declares, reflexively, “Bach.” To get down to technicalities, the music is in the key of D minor, a key of tragedy, and in the Baroque times, of piety, here making use of the two middle strings as tonic and dominant. It begins with an Allemande which, as musical as it may be, might be the movement that is least transparent about its roots in dance. The Courante follows, featuring a flowing triplet rhythm, and the Sarabande introduces a note of pathos. The lively Gigue could easily have served as a finale, but Bach goes one step further and adds the astonishing Chaconne, one of the highlights of all music. A chaconne is traditionally a moderate dance, in three, that features a short, repeating bass, which one can hear most clearly in the first four measures, but which is maintained throughout. These inherent repetitions provide a venue for exploring variations and counterpoint. In this work, Bach is not only writing for a conventionally single-line instrument, he heaps further demands on the player and places further restrictions on himself as a composer: to maintain a repeating “bass” part on a violin and to spin out a coherent, varied, evolving texture above this. Which Bach does, and requires his performer to do, for a period of time that doubles the rest of the Partita and then some. The bassline repeats and is varied more than 60 times, passing through a succession of musical guises, sometimes like a courante, at other times like a sarabande, or a prelude, and always logically flowing to the next mood. At about the midpoint, the mode shifts to a brighter D major, but then turns back to the minor before ending with a restatement of the opening measures.
In Sonata No. 3 we finally arrive at our first in a major key: C major, traditionally a representation of purity and majesty. With the opening of the Adagio, however, although we begin on the pitch C, the double-stopped dotted rhythms climb their way astray from the home key into chromatic territory and a first cadence in D minor. The movement retains a sense of restless striving with few pauses on firm ground. The movement comes to rest on a dominant, leading straight on to the fugue, with its almost entirely linear primary subject. The narrow range of this idea allows for hitherto unimaginable combinations, where the subject is combined in stretto and inversion (a mirror image in pitches, where intervals that went up, instead go down). Structurally, the fugue is in eight parts, alternating the slower, linear style in the opening with passages of quicker rhythms and more figuration. Once again, this contrapuntal movement, to an even greater degree than the great Chaconne, occupies a space greater than the other three movements in the work combined. The Largo provides a much-needed moment of serenity before the final movement, a kind of réjouissance, literally a lively gathering, as a very quick final dance in 3/4 time.
Finally, in Partita No. 3, we have an opening in a sparkling major key, the violinist showering a cataract of shimmering lines and arpeggios as sure as sunshine on a roaring brook. The following Loure has a courtly lilt in 6/4 time. The charming Gavotte en rondeau has been transcribed for many instruments and has been popularized on the classical guitar. The Menuet continues the courtly style with its measured tempo and firm on-beat accents. With the lively Bourrée, the courtly restraints begin to loosen, with more wild and florid flourishes. The final Gigue ensures that a swinging, brisk, and showy finale closes off the proceedings with humor and a sense of celebration.
—By Mark Mandarano