Bach’s music can be sublime, uplifting or exciting, as complicated as a chess game or as apparently simple as child’s play. It is often towering architecture.
All of this was apparent in the performance at Town Hall Friday by Baroque cellist Jaap ter Linden of three of the composer’s suites for unaccompanied cello. In the hands of this elder statesman among Baroque musicians, the music was also profound, deeply thought out and felt, and its messages conveyed as though by a bard, a master story teller.
This is how ter Linden sees them, he says in the notes: structures of great beauty and harmony through which it’s his privilege to act as guide.
Indeed, listening to the First Suite in G Major, the Fifth in C Minor and the Sixth in D Major, the moods were clear and each very different.
Although all the Suites have dance names for their movements, these are really not danceable, nor does it seem likely that Bach intended that.
We don’t hear much solo Baroque cello here in Seattle, being more familiar with the solo sound of viola da gamba. The timbre of the 1703 cello by Giovanni Grancino which ter Linden used for the first two suites, is softer, gentler and less bright that that of the gamba. That of the five-string Baroque cello, made for him by Bart Visser in 1998 had a more open, sunnier sound.
In ter Linden’s hands, this performance was a rich, sophisticated painting in music, with a myriad colors and moods and, to take it all in, it seemed best to this listener to close the eyes and turn off all the other senses except hearing, and then listen with all her might.
Ter Linden’s musical style is conversational, the rhythms and time signatures ebbing and flowing with the shape of the unspoken words, though always within 18th century boundaries of restrained elegance.
In all three suites, the fourth movement, the Sarabande, seemed to embody the essence of that particular group of dances. Thus, the first suite Sarabande was a musing, eloquent soliloquy, that of the Sixth serenely happy, but the fifth one seemed a statement of bottomless grief and desolation. Other movements had different aspects of these characteristics, thus the cheerful Prelude and light, bubbly Courante of the Sixth Suite, which ter Linden played on the five-stringed cello; and the mournful Prelude, pensive, contemplative Allemande and sedate Gigue of the Fifth, in which Bach decreed the retuning of the cello so that the uppermost string instead of being an A was tuned to G, changing the resonance of the entire instrument.
The virtually full house listened with total attention. You could have heard a pin drop between movements. Nowadays we have in the area such a number of period instrument ensembles or groups devoted to vocal music of the Medieval through Baroque eras, that there is both considerable interest in and knowledge of the genre, which makes for even deeper appreciation of the international caliber concerts brought us by the Early Music Guild. This was no exception.
Given the size of the audience, maybe those wishing to attend the EMG’s next offering, Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,” staged by Italy’s Baroque opera company La Venexiana, should line up their tickets now if they want a seat.
