Miller Theatre at Columbia University 2014-15 | 26th Season Bach, Revisited Michael Gordon + Bach Ensemble Signal Kristian Bezuidenhout, harpsichord Courtney Orlando, violin Christa Robinson, oboe Brad Lubman, conductor Thursday, March 12, 8:00 p.m. From the Executive Director March certainly began with a roar. The Portrait of Augusta Read Thomas featured an unscored snowstorm to greet the world premiere performance of her new octet Selene (named after the Greek goddess of the moon), a string quartet from her Sun Threads series, and the New York premiere of Resounding Earth. Written for Third Coast Percussion, Resounding Earth features a unique collection of over 125 bells from around the world which the ensemble drove from Chicago to New York (through another snowstorm) to make the performance possible. Tonight marks the start of this season’s Bach, Revisited series. Pairing musical trailblazers across the centuries makes for dynamic programs and, sometimes, fierce challenges for the performers. Michael Gordon, Helmut Lachenmann, and Sofia Gubaidulina are composers familiar to Miller audiences from the Composer Portraits series. They each strike me as a natural fit with Bach. They are also composers whose work requires musicians with an intrepid spirit and the utmost skill. Some of the repertoire pairings in these concerts are the musical equivalent of an Ironman! We’re lucky that Ensemble Signal has fully embraced the challenge as resident ensemble for the series. We close the month with the final performance of this season’s Early Music series. Les Délices will join us at Miller Theatre on March 28 for a gorgeous evening of Baroque works inspired by Homer’s Odyssey. This program, Myths & Allegories, weaves together a selection of Baroque works to illuminate the story of Ulysses. Works by Jean-Féry Rebel, Thomas-Louis Bourgeois, and Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (the first French woman to compose an opera) paint a fascinating picture of how artists across the centuries connect to this story of homecoming. Let’s look forward to welcoming spring with an amazing lineup of concerts at Miller. Thank you for being a part of it! Melissa Smey Executive Director Miller Theatre at Columbia University 2014-15 | 26th Season Bach, Revisited Thursday, March 12, 8:00 p.m. Michael Gordon + Bach Ensemble Signal Brad Lubman, conductor Concerto for Harpsichord in G minor, BWV 1058 J. S. Bach (1685-1750) Kristian Bezuidenhout, harpsichord I. Allegro II. Andante III. Allegro assai Concerto for Violin and Oboe in C minor, BWV 1060 Bach Courtney Orlando, violin; Christa Robinson, oboe I. Allegro II. Adagio III. Allegro INTERMISSION Dry (2013) U.S. premiere Michael Gordon (b. 1956) Hyper (2014) New York premiere Gordon This program runs approximately one hour and forty-five minutes including intermission. Major support for Bach, Revisited is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trusts. Please note that photography and the use of recording devices are not permitted. Remember to turn off all cellular phones and pagers before tonight’s performance begins. Miller Theatre is ADA accessible. Large print programs are available upon request. For more information or to arrange accommodations, please call 212-854-7799. About the Program Johann Sebastian Bach Concerto for Harpsichord in G minor, BWV 1058 Energized lines playing over one another in a mirror maze: this could be referring to Ba- chian counterpoint or equally to the music of Michael Gordon. All four of this evening’s pieces, whether from the first half of the eighteenth century or of the twenty-first, race with driving rhythm and self-similarity. All four engage small groups of instruments, alike and unalike: six parts in the Bach concertos, eight and ten in the Gordon pieces. Like many composers of our own time, Bach had a flexible notion of the orchestra as a group of soloists, probably no more than twenty in number. The court at Cöthen, the small city where he was music director from 1717 to 1723, had a documented ensemble of eighteen instrumentalists, for whom Bach wrote a lot of his larger instrumental scores (probably including both this evening’s concertos in their original versions, and also the Brandenburg set), as well as solo and chamber pieces. Much of this music he brought out again and revised during the next phase of his life, in Leipzig, where he not only ran the church music but also, between 1729 and 1741, directed weekly concerts at Zimmermann’s coffee house. The source for his seven solo keyboard concertos is a draft he made around 1738, though some or all of the works may have been designed in Cöthen for other solo instruments. That is certainly the case with this G minor con- certo, originally for violin. We might imagine Bach himself playing this concerto, whether at Cöthen or in the Leipzig coffee house, but at the latter venue he might have given the solo part to one of his elder sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel. The first movement of a concerto customarily alternated the principal theme with contrasting episodes in which the solo instrument or instruments could shine, but Bach was always after a firmer integration, with the episodes drawing material from the theme, as it is here and will be again in the C minor concerto for violin and oboe. Three strong descend- ing thrusts at the outset thus determine the character not only of the theme but of the whole opening movement. When the keyboard soloist takes over, it is to reconsider rather than diverge, and the movement continues through a nice interweaving of varia- tion and innovation. So it goes, again, in the subsequent movements, the andante set on a spacious rhythm but exploring harmonic byways from its base in B flat. The finale is a gigue in 9/8, with the piano rushing into sixteenth notes before a pause on a dominant seventh chord, and racing on again afterwards. Concerto for Violin and Oboe in C minor, BWV 1060 Most of Bach’s concertos for multiple keyboard instruments—two, three, and four— were again transcriptions, the original of what survives as a C minor double concerto probably having been for two violins or for violin and oboe, the possibility here restored. Among the symmetries in the first movement’s main theme is a kind of double echo effect, for not only does its fourth measure end with the soloists immediately repeating alone the full ensemble’s falling fifth, but this whole element, A–D–A–D in eighth notes, is an expansion of the E flat–D–E flat–D in sixteenths at the end of the second measure. In keeping with concerto form, and this example of it in particular, the soloists other- wise play in unison with the first violins in the theme and, when the two intermittently break away, the solo oboe has the melody, dazzlingly accompanied by the solo violin. The interplay of the main theme with its episodes is at once subtle and logical, depend- ing on how a few ideas can be reused in manifold ways. The slow movement is a siciliana (a dance with the spacious meter of four three-note groups per measure), arriving into the calm of the relative major, E flat. With the oboe taking the principal line at the start, the movement gains a pastoral air. The violin replies a fifth above, and the movement continues with the soloists fully forward, in alternation at different degrees, to end on a G major chord in preparation for the return- ing C minor of the finale. With the swing and drive and robust harmony of a country dance, this finale shows how Bach, as much as Gordon, had his ear to the dance patterns of the epoch. Again there is a small element that recurs in different forms, here consisting of a threefold repetition of a note at quarter-note intervals. Right at the unharmonized beginning, the note is C, in- terspersed with a falling scale: C–G–C–F–C–E flat. Four measures later, this is turned upside down, and later still, the repeated notes are played alone, with no intervention. Motivic integration of a similar kind knits the recurrences of the fully scored main theme to the episodes more intimately scored for the soloists with minimal support. Now the violin has its chance to astonish, in swoops of sixteenth notes, later sped up to triplets, which freeze the orchestral strings. But everything here is conjoined: soloist with soloist, soloists with ensemble, the brilliant and the plain. About the Program Michael Gordon Dry (2013) Gordon wrote this piece for the Crash Ensemble of Dublin, who gave the première at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2013. The scoring is for alto flute, clarinet, trombone, elec- tric keyboard, electric guitar, tuned gongs, and four strings, all amplified. At the start, and in much that follows during the course of this eighteen-minute piece, instruments are repeating notes in repeating rhythms, as if signaling to one another, generally with fading dynamics. They hold on to their identities; clarinet, keyboard, and electric guitar, for instance, keep up patterns of long-long-long-long-short. As more instruments join in the number of speeds and patterns increases, and eventu- ally some of the instruments, beginning with the tuned gongs, break away from simple note-bouncing into slower or faster alternations, in music that is constantly expanding and contracting in density. Then a new sound arrives: a slow glissando, up and down, on cello soon joined by electric guitar and later by the trombone. These melodized groans grow and remain through much of the piece—through further extensions of the sound mass (into high melody from the electric guitar, for instance) and returns to how things were before.