welcome Dear Friends, Welcome to the opening concert of Emmanuel Music’s 45th sea- son! In our three major concerts we return to our beginnings and our core – the music of J.S. Bach. But we are bringing new per- spectives that promise to offer discoveries and revelations to all, whether you have been steeped in Bach’s music for years or are just now discovering its richness. Emmanuel Music began 45 years ago this December with the mission of performing Bach cantatas for Emmanuel Church’s Sunday services. Our weekly collaborative explo- rations of Bach’s music make us uniquely positioned to explore Bach in new ways that are both deeply understood and deeply felt. Bach is the father of classical music, and he created or foreshadowed virtually every development that followed. And so tonight we explore rearrangements – Bach’s own and those of others -- that let us hear some of his compositions newly and freshly. What happens when Bach reimagines a concerto for three harpsichords as a concerto for three violins? Or when Stravinsky puts his own stamp on selections from The Well-Tempered Clavier? Or when Ward Swingle rearranges selected Bach pieces for an a capella octet, with one voice to a part? Our ears open to the richness of his composi- tions and the range of voices and variations. We marvel that there is always more to discover. Two more major concerts will explore unusual aspects of Bach. On March 19 we per- form a reconstruction of Bach’s lostSt. Mark Passion, and on April 9 we collaborate with Urbanity Dance, Betsi Graves, Director, to bring to life J. S. Bach’s The Contest between Phoebus and Pan and Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins. The performance space will be in and among the audience, for unparalleled immediacy and impact. And let’s not forget the chamber series, where we bring you masterpieces by Felix Mendelssohn as well as Wolf’s greatest song cycle, The Italian Songbook. This season’s chamber series will truly stand out as among the best of those we’ve presented over many decades. Whether you are discovering Emmanuel Music or returning for the latest of many sea- sons, we welcome you to savor the music with us. There will be many moments of unsurpassed beauty. All the Best, Kate Kush President, Emmanuel Music Board emmanuel music Swingle Singers Selections Ryan Turner, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR John Harbison, PRINCIPAL GUEST CONDUCTOR Prelude No. 1 in C Major, BWV 846 from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 BACH REARRANGED Gigue from Cello Suite No. 3 in C Major, BWV 1009 J. S. BACH | IGOR STRAVINSKY | WARD SWINGLE Sinfonia No. 11 in g Minor, BWV 797 Badinerie from Orchestral Suite No. 2 in b minor, BWV 1067 SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2015 – 8:00 PM “Little” Fugue in g minor, BWV 578 Pre-concert conversation at 7:00 PM with John Heiss and Christopher Krueger Margot Rood and Shari Wilson, soprano Carrie Cheron and Margaret Lias, alto Orchestral Suite No. 2 in b minor, BWV 1067 J. S. Bach Charles Blandy and Jonas Budris, tenor (1685-1750) Jacob Cooper and Donald Wilkinson, bass Overture - Rondeau - Sarabande - Bourrée I & II - Polonaise & Double - Sponsored by Butler and Lois Lampson Minuet - Badinerie Robert Schultz, drums and Bebo Shiu, bass Christopher Krueger, flute The Orchestra and Soloists of Emmanuel Music Concerto for Three Violins in D Major, BWV 1064R J. S. Bach Ryan Turner, conductor Allegro - Adagio - Allegro Tonight’s performance is made possible in part through the generosity of Hanna and James Bartlett. Heather Braun, Heidi Braun-Hill & Rose Drucker, violin ***INTERMISSION*** The audience is cordially invited to join Ryan Turner and the musicians at a Four Preludes and Fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier post-concert reception in Wolfinsohn Recital Room directly following the performance. Prelude and Fugue No. 10 in e minor J. S. Bach BWV 854 from Book 1 arr. Igor Stravinsky Prelude and Fugue No. 4 in c-sharp minor ed. Christopher Hogwood BWV 849 from Book 1 Prelude and Fugue No. 11 in F Major This project is funded in part by grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the BWV 880 from Book 2 Boston Cultural Council, a local agency funded by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Prelude and Fugue No. 24 in b minor administerd by the Mayor’s Office of Arts, Tourism, and Special Events. BWV 869 from Book 1 PROGRAM NOTES PROGRAM NOTES Bach was the first great composer to be forgotten by the general public and then to re- going back to the ballet suites in 17th-century French opera. The dances’ standard con- emerge to take his place as one of the masters. However, The Well-Tempered Clavier, his ventions are audible, however, Bach transforms them through elaborate ornamentation encyclopedic two-volume keyboard collection, never went unplayed. Within thirty years and by pushing traditional French dances past formal bounds, such as the strict canon of Bach’s death, Mozart was busy studying The Well-Tempered Clavier and Beethoven was at the fifth between the flute/first violins and bass in the Sarabande, the ornate flute learning to play the piano by practicing its twenty-four preludes and fugues. The entire figurations in the Polonaise and the flute fireworks of the extremely rare and virtuosic generation of composers born around 1810—Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Liszt, Badinerie. etc.—thought of Bach as essential to the foundation of music itself, and they considered The Well-Tempered Clavier as the bedrock of their keyboard technique. Bach’s collection Today’s leading Bach scholar Christoph Wolff posits: remained a touchstone for the most adventurous composers of the twentieth century as well. Charles Ives and Igor Stravinsky played one of the fugues every morning before break- By composing dances Bach significantly refined his musical language, not so much in the fast, to start the day fresh. Arnold Schoenberg, who made a full orchestral transcription of basic realm of vocabulary, syntax, and grammar but notably in the area of articulation the E-flat Major Prelude and Fugue (Saint Anne), liked to call Bach “the first composer with and expression. Nowhere else but in his suites of dances do we encounter a more sys- twelve tones,” thinking of the b minor Fugue from Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, in tematic, sophisticated, and far ranging exploration of the subtleties of musical articula- which all twelve steps of the chromatic scale appear in the opening subject. tion and along with it the fine tuning of musical expression. Yet we know surprisingly little about Johann Sebastian Bach. The details of his life are vague beyond the basic résumé of court and church positions; they make for no more than a one- BACH Concerto for Three Violins in D, BWV 1064R dimensional figure. “Since he never wrote down anything about his life,” his son Carl Philipp INSTRUMENTATION three solo violins, strings, continuo Emanuel said, “the gaps are unavoidable.” With dozens of students to teach, music to write on order, and ten children to raise (another ten died in infancy), he was too busy to worry The keyboard concertos, like the details of Bach’s life, pose more questions than an- about posterity. A great deal of Bach’s music survives, but, incredibly, there’s much more swers. We are not sure when they were composed and for whom, and, in many cases, that didn’t. It is speculated that over two hundred compositions from the Weimar years are even what instrument they originally were written for, since most are arrangements of lost, and that just 15 to 20 percent of Bach’s output from his subsequent time in Cöthen has earlier works. Of the fourteen surviving concertos for one, two, three, or four keyboards survived. Two-fifths of the cantatas he wrote in Leipzig have never been found. There also that Bach composed in Leipzig in the 1730s, only one was actually written with the key- are many unanswered questions about the music by Bach that we do have. board in mind. Of the rest, we know for certain the original scoring of just three. It was only after Bach had taken charge of the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig in the 1730s BACH Orchestral Suite No. 2 in b minor, BWV 1067 that he began to produce keyboard concertos at all, and his usual practice was to adapt COMPOSED 1738-39 music he had composed earlier. The idea of writing for more than one keyboard may INSTRUMENTATION flute, strings, continuo simply have been suggested by the large number of musicians in the Bach household, in particular his two oldest sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel. It is gen- The numbering of Bach’s four suites is a convention that has little to do with their order erally believed that all of these works are actually arrangements of preexisting concer- of composition. The first and fourth suites originate from around 1725, with the third dat- tos for other instruments. Scholars have worked to reconstruct the “original” concertos ed, with some certainty, from 1731. The second suite, with its hybrid mixture of concerto from these secondary sources, and the Concerto for Three Violins in C Major (performed elements and suite form and the extraordinary virtuosity of its flute writing, dates from at this concert in the preferred key of D), after the Concerto for Three Harpsichords in C 1738–39 and hence counts as Bach’s very last orchestral work. All four orchestral suites Major, is one of these re-created works. The version is, therefore, more an act of plau- were likely performed by the musicians of the Collegium Musicum in Leipzig, which Bach sible reconstruction than an arrangement; it is actually Bach’s version for three harpsi- led from 1729 to 1737 and then again from 1739 until his death in 1750.