By Robert Croan
I love Bach! Full disclosure. We don’t get enough Bach on the local music scene.
Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived and worked in five German cities from 1685-1750, was to become the father of modern classical music. Without polemics or academics, his music set the rules and esthetic principles of the three centuries of Western music that followed him.
At the start of South Florida Symphony Orchestra’s third and last summer chamber music concert [seen July 25 at Fort Lauderdale’s Center for Spiritual Living], cellist Claudio Jaffé introduced Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in D Minor (BWV 1052) as the prototype of the classical piano concerto – though written for harpsichord in 1738 – and the ancestor of the iconic concertos by Tchaikovsky, Grieg or Rachmaninov. On still another level, Bach’s music is permeated with mathematic minutiae of harmony and counterpoint that affect the listener subliminally without demanding prior knowledge or conscious awareness.
And what an exhilarating listening experience it turned out to be. With pianist Catherine Lan pitted against the string ensemble of SFSO violinists Huifang Chen and Erika Venable, violist Brandon Wu and bassist Amy Nickler along with Jaffé, the effect of a small-vs.-large sonic edifice permeated the attractive and comfortable auditorium in an upfront and personal way. There’s just nothing else like Bach in the history of music.
More details of the performance later. Equally significant was the fact that both this and the previous night’s performance in the Coral Gables Museum were sold out: Evidence of the need for more chamber music in South Florida as well as the excellence and outreach of this invaluable local orchestra.
Back to Bach: Lan deftly negotiated the intricacies of a work in which she must go through all sorts of digital hoops without a break, every measure of each of the concerto’s three movements a perpetual motion or a rhapsodic improvisation. The string players, for their part, provided contrast in the fast movements’ “ritornelli” — recurring orchestral melodies that set into high relief the soloist’s flights of melodic fancy. Their momentum never flagged. Rhythms were keen and steady. Unison passages in the central Adagio were flawlessly in sync.
In sharp stylistic contrast was the congenial and ebullient String Quintet No. 2 (in G major, Op. 77) by Antonín Dvořák. String quintets are something of a rarity in classical repertory, almost always the traditional string quartet combination of two violins, viola and cello plus one more. Mozart’s six string quintets added a second viola; Schubert’s unique and magnificent C Major Quintet brought in a second cello. Dvořák, in his two works for five strings, required a string quartet plus bass, imparting a remarkably deep resonance to the proceedings.
Like the Bach concerto, this is music of joy, here expressed in the idiom of Dvořák’s native Bohemia. It’s pleasant rather than profound. Folk tunes and native dance rhythms abound. The SFSO players reveled in these, playing throughout with drive and drama. Some roughness along the way underlined the score’s rusticity. The Scherzo alternated the peasant waltz beats with songful interludes. The Andante, emulating a hymn of praise, evoked the composer’s spiritual side, exquisitely delineated at the outset by Chen’s sweet-voiced violin, while the finale returned to the bristly exuberance that had set matters into motion earlier on.
This is a series that deserves to be expanded, perhaps for a fourth concert next summer, or intermittent chamber music events during the regular season. These individual performers, members of the orchestra, play together with a confidence and unity that should be the envy of the very best dedicated chamber ensembles on the concert scene today.