Bach the Terminal Point

Heitor Villa-Lobos called Bach "...a kind of universal folkloric source, rich and profound."  He mined a particularly rich Bachian vein throughout his career, as have so many other composers, including Mozart, Chopin, Debussy.  "Study Bach," said Brahms, "there you will find everything."  One way to pay back this influence is to write music in homage: Villa's Bachianas Brasileiras, Stokowski's orchestral adaptations of preludes and fugues, Shostakovich's great Preludes and Fugues for piano, Penderecki's St. Luke Passion. There are hundreds, thousands, of others.

For this project Matt Haimovitz commissioned six composers - Philip Glass, Du Yun, Vijay Iyer, Roberto Sierra, David Sanford, and Luna Pearl Woolf - to write music for solo cello that would naturally lead into six different movements from the Solo Suites. In a process that Bach the every-day professional musician would have found familiar, these commissions interrupted the composers' current work - on Glass's opera Appomattox and Woolf's opera Better Gods - or started a back-and-forth collaboration between composer and performer, as happened between Haimovitz and Iyer. The composers' ideas encouraged Haimovitz to explore new techniques: microtonality in the music of Du Yun, the jazz bassist's repertoire of pizzicato and a different forms of scordatura with David Sanford, and an exploration of the five-string cello piccolo in the work of his partner Luna Pearl Woolf. He uses a variety of bows - Baroque and modern - throughout. None of this trial-and-error and technical innovation gets in the way of the music; it all sounds completely natural and organic. There is similarly no jarring transition between the new music and Bach, which is a tribute to the composers, the performer, and genius of Bach himself.

As with all the best encounters between artists, the more each composer focusses on Bach the more personal the music becomes. Haimovitz is demonstrating in these commissions and his superb Bach performances the truth of Borges' statement in his essay Kafka and His Precursors: "The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future."



"Bach is a terminal point," Albert Schweitzer once said. "Nothing comes from him; everything merely leads up to him." So all music in homage to Bach is really a kind of overture.

The Pentatone CD will be released September 9, 2016.

A weighty symphony from Nashville

From January 9, 2014:

Roberto Sierra's Sinfonia no. 4 is part of the great Germanic symphonic tradition, as the composer himself states in his liner notes for this new Naxos CD. But even more so, I think, it follows the lead of great Latin American composers like Carlos Chavez, who wrote six symphonies, and Villa-Lobos, who wrote eleven, while never sounding like Brahms or Mahler. Alberto Ginastera comes to mind as well, though he wrote only Symphonic Movements and Estudios Sinfonicos, and not named Symphonies. Like these masters, Sierra's music is more rhapsodic; it evolves organically, rather than dialectically. This Symphony remains serious and vital music, and it's presented in a thoughtful manner by Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony. The rhythmic variety of Sierra's music serves a structural purpose, and is not only there to provide coloristic, "Latin" effects. It seems sometimes Bachian, in the manner of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras.



Sierra took 18th Century music as the starting-off point for his Fandangos, making reference to Antonio Soler, Domenico Scarlatti and Luigi Boccherini, all of whom worked in Spain. This is lively music designed to show off the virtuoso capabilities of an orchestra. The Nashville musicians come through with flying colours, as they so often have in their Naxos recordings in the past decade.

Carnaval makes reference to Schumann's 'characteristic' piano pieces, but these miniatures of distilled character also bring to mind short, pointed, contrasting pieces from Latin America, such as the Prole do Bebe by Villa-Lobos, Camargo Guarnieri's Ponteios, or the suites and dances of Ernesto Lecuona.

Giancarlo Guerreo is having an outstanding time as Music Director of the Nashville Symphony, building it into one of America's finest orchestras, in live performance as well as on disc. This disc is another example of how important Nashville has become in classical as well as so many other kinds of music.

Fun and moving music from a great Quartet

June 18, 2010:

With 28 years of experience playing string quartets, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano are well-placed to put together a programme like this one. Over the years they've championed (and commissioned or were dedicatees for) many great string quartets by contemporary composers of The Americas. From what I'm sure is a much longer list, they've put together a winning programme of encores for this CD.

The Cuarteto Latinoamericano made a big stir lately with their recordings and performances of the complete String Quartets of Villa-Lobos. Here they present a craggy Valsa by Villa's compatriot Radames Gnattali. Roberto Sierra wrote his Mambo 7/16 for the Cuarteto, and they've mastered its tricky rhythms (I'm assuming that took some significant work, even for these accomplished musicians.) The Italian Stefano Scodanibbio is represented by pieces from his Mexican Songbook, which are oddly, and interestingly, twisted versions of Mexican popular songs. I'm sure these are popular as encores, and they're scatted throughout the CD as individual pieces. But I enjoyed listening to them together as a group on my iPod.

The five short pieces by Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez that make up Cinco para Cuarto are much more serious in tone. They are dedicated to the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, and are presented here to the best possible effect. Another more solemn work, by Osvaldo Golijov, is the Yiddishbbuk, three lamentations that commemorate child victims of the Nazis at Terezin. This is such powerful music!

The programme closes with works by the Mexican Jorge Torres Saenz (another work with tricky rhythms: La Venus se va de juerga), the Spaniard Adolfo Salazar (his exotic Rubaiyat), and the American David Stock (the haunting Suenos de Sefarad). It's all enjoyable and often moving music from an amazing group.

November 2, 2015 update: Just heard from Cuarteto Latinoamericano's Twitter feed about the recent passing of David Stock. I'm listening to Suenos de Sefarad in his memory.