July 18, 7:00pm Town Hall, Waterloo Center for the Arts
Letters to BACH
A program featuring: Bach’s Goldberg Variations, one of the great piano quintets of the 20th century inspired by Bach, and two lesser known works that pay homage to the styles and forms of the Baroque.
Numerology? Musical cryptograms? Bach loved puzzles and writing them into his music in ways that even Robert Langdon would admire.
These ideas take on an almost mythical ethos in Bach’s biography. The second concert of the season takes a look at one such musical puzzle, the Goldberg Variations in a chamber music version for string trio.
The Goldberg Variations are one of a handful of works by Bach that have transcended classical music and, thanks to pianist Glenn Gould, have become part of popular culture. The piece is a set of thirty variations on an original aria and is dedicated to the virtuoso keyboardist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727-1756) who was one of Bach’s pupils. The Goldberg Variations are not a traditional “theme and variations” where a singular melodic idea is varied, rather Bach offers us a 32 measure highly ornamented aria with a distinct bass line and it is the bass line that forms the basis for these variations. It is therefore the harmonic aspect of the work that the Goldberg Variations find their basis so that what we are essentially left with is written-out jazz from the baroque era!
Bookmarking the other end of this program is the Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57 of Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich, and his embrace of Bach’s music, is also featured on the first program with his Prelude and Fugues, Op. 87. References to Bach can be found in a large number of pieces in the Shostakovich catalog. Indeed, it is Shostakovich’s mastery of fugal writing and counterpoint that has become so essential to his musical ethos. The Piano Quintet is another one of these works. It begins with a massive prelude and fugue that covers the entire first two movements of the piece. It meets Bach on his own terms but with a different language and a musical purity and icy distance that pure Shostakovich.
In between Bach and Shostakovich are two works that reference Bach more tangentially. The first is the Passacaglia and Fugue of Tomas Svoboda (1939-2022). This piano trio contains one of the most beautiful passacaglia’s ever composed and a virtuoso fugue that is almost hard to believe. It was composed for the Mirecourt Trio who were in residency at Grinnell College here in Iowa. Also on this program is a “Toccata” for piano quintet where the composer, Olli Mustonen, channels Bach and the baroque idea of a toccata while composing this work, allowing it to influence the textures and structure of the piece without ever directly quoting Bach or copying Baroque ideas.
Program
- Bach: selections from the Goldberg Variations (arr. Sitkovetsky)
- Svoboda: Passacaglia and Fugue, Op. 87 (1981)
- Mustonen: Toccata (1997)
- Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57 (1940)
Meet the Artists
- Sean Botkin, piano
- Julia Bullard, viola
- Hunter Capoccioni, double bass
- Max Geissler, cello
- Julie Fox Henson, violin
- Joanna Mendoza, viola
- Theo Ramsey, violin
- Erik Rohde, violin