Bach Sinfonias
Program Notes by Jennifer Gersten
The pianist Simone Dinnerstein, a much-beloved Miller Theatre artistic partner, returns for the 2023-24 season with the last of three programs delving into that endlessly renewable artistic resource: the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Choosing works for a program is about more than identifying what pieces will sound good together, though that is a central concern; a program can also chart unexpected throughlines across styles and eras, allowing the audience to hear the familiar anew.
In this third and final performance of Miller Theatre’s Bach series curated by Simone Dinnerstein, the pianist performs a solo recital of Bach alongside a microcosm of solo keyboard works—by the American contemporary composer Philip Lasser, the Baroque composer and Bach contemporary Jean-Philippe Rameau, and the American pianist and composer Keith Jarrett.
Dinnerstein will open with Lasser’s Twelve Variations on a Chorale by J.S. Bach, composed in 2002. Lasser, a composition professor at Juilliard who has written several other works for the pianist, is a close friend whom Dinnerstein met through the cellist Zuill Bailey. Lasser’s approach “fuses compositional understanding, and, I would say, a deeply spiritual feeling about the music, a living understanding of its essence,“ Dinnerstein says. “He has a profound understanding of Bach, and whenever he draws inspiration directly from Bach, something really special takes place.” His voice evinces his French background—Lasser’s mother was French, and he studied with the famed composition pedagogue Nadia Boulanger—but contains an openness that is unmistakably American. Dinnerstein will then continue without pause to Rameau’s Gavotte et 6 doubles (“double” being an old French term for “variation”), whose form and French Baroque elegance remind her of Lasser’s work.
Dinnerstein will next perform Bach’s Sinfonias for solo keyboard, a set of 15 short pieces that contain three contrapuntal voices (unlike the more frequently-played 15 Inventions, published in the same collection, which contain two). In the Sinfonias, the player confronts the challenge of making this third voice, which lies between the left and right hands, sound seamless and independent, as though a third hand were playing. “Each one is so short and perfect,” she says, and of a distinct character. “They’re almost like a set of 15 poems.” While Dinnerstein recorded the Sinfonias in 2014, this will be her first time performing them in public. “The big difference for me that live performance presents,” she reflects, “is that I want each piece to make sense as a member of the set as well as individually, so that together they all make a certain kind of shape as well as having their own individual characters. That matters less on a recording, where you know that people are going to dip in and out however much you try to create an experience that lasts from first note to final note.”
“By starting with the Lasser and ending with the Jarrett, the recital will have a circular feeling...These are composers who have something in common, even though they’re from totally different worlds.”
The recital will conclude in the not-so-distant past with a transcription of Keith Jarrett’s Encore from Tokyo, which the pianist presented as an improvisation following his performance there in the fall of 1976.Jarrett, whose considerable musical acumen extends to the classical and Baroque, has often drawn upon those styles in his improvisations, including in Encore, which opens with an arpeggiated ostinato reminiscent of the Prélude from Bach’s ubiquitous Suite No. 1 in G Major for solo cello. “By starting with the Lasser and ending with the Jarrett, the recital will have a circular feeling,” Dinnerstein explained. “These are composers who have something in common, even though they’re from totally different worlds.”
Twelve Variations on a Chorale by J.S. Bach
For inspiration, the American composer Philip Lasser (b. 1963) has turned time and again to the works of J.S. Bach. His Twelve Variations on a Chorale by J.S. Bach emerged from his fascination with Bach’s chorales, harmonizations of Lutheran hymns for chorus and instrumental accompaniment, of which there are over 400. As Lasser describes, these works have largely been employed in classrooms to teach the rules of harmony, though their even more significant achievement lies in how Bach so comprehensively exploits the original hymn for new material. In Twelve Variations, Lasser draws upon this gambit, taking as his substrate Bach’s 1724 chorale Nimm von uns, Herr, du Treuer Gott (‘Take from us, Lord, Thou demanding God’) from Cantata 101, derived from a hymn by the 16th-century poet and mystic Martin Moller.
The 22-minute work for solo piano, which has been a part of Dinnerstein’s repertoire for some time, is a dissection of that chorale, with each short movement after the opening theme musing on a different aspect of the Bach. We find a portfolio of various characters, spanning the dignified Piú vivo (Var. 2) to the squirrelly Allegro vivace (Var. 6), that increasingly evince Lasser’s French training, with their plush harmonies and occasionally mercurial feeling. In Variation 11, “Variations on Variations,” the efforts of the previous ten musings are presented in aggregate before proceeding to the final variation, which newly encapsulates the source material.
Gavotte et 6 doubles
Though the French Baroque composer and music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau established the bulk of his reputation on his theory treatises and operas (a career he began, in a sort of second wind, at the age of 50), his glory also rests on his earlier small but mighty output for harpsichord. His first collection of works for the instrument, Premier livre de pièces de clavecin (‘First book of harpsichord pieces’), composed during his first stint in Paris in 1706, was met favorably, though it was his second, Pièces de clavecin avec une méthode sur la mécanique des doigts (‘Harpsichord pieces, with a method for fingering’), composed 18 years later upon his permanent return to the capital, that convinced the city of his prowess.
Gavotte et 6 doubles is the final movement of the Suite in A minor from Rameau’s Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin (‘New suites of pieces for the harpsichord’), his last collection for the instrument. As the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani writes, this oft-performed work diverts from the conventions of the time in that it seems nearly to propose the harpsichord “as a substitute for the orchestra in a way that must have shocked [Rameau’s] contemporaries.” The work begins with the Gavotte, a composition modeled after the French dance of moderate tempo in 4/4 time, that comprises two themes: a solemn first in minor, followed by a more hopeful second in major. Next come the first three “doubles” (an old French word for variation), faster movements in which the performer maintains strings of running sixteenth notes in one hand or the other. In the fourth double, Rameau hands the performer the fresh challenge of creating a ping-pong effect by playing each note of the melody line twice, once with each hand, which should sound ideally as though played by a single hand. This ping-ponging effect proceeds through the final two doubles, which cap the work with virtuosity and zest.
15 Sinfonias BWV 787-801
First documented as half of a collection that also includes the more frequently performed 15 Inventions, the 15 Sinfonias for solo keyboard, like a number of Bach’s works, humbly entered this world as exercises for Bach’s students on playing and writing in three voices. In his inscription to the manuscript, Bach indicates that the more complex Sinfonias, written in three-part counterpoint, can inspire not only good technical development, but also a touch for cantabile playing (meaning “songlike,” referring to a sung quality and
smooth connections between notes, but which here also describes clear overall expression of the different voices), as well as “a strong foretaste for composition.” The objective, whether one is performing or composing, is for the middle voice, situated on the piano between the right and left hands, to match the importance of the top and bottom voices—a quest any middle child will readily understand— and ultimately for any voice to flourish regardless of its position in the stack.
The 15 Sinfonias (“sinfonia” being then another word for a short musical composition), like the Inventions, are organized by ascending key starting with C major, and alternate between major and minor. Each begins with one or two voices, then adds the third shortly following, as would be the case in a fugue. In character, however, each charts its own path. Some bop, others twirl, a few sit and gaze sternly out the window, wondering when the rain will stop. The result is as much composition as portraiture.
Encore from Tokyo
In the early 1970s, having established himself as a formidable presence in the jazz world, the American pianist and composer Keith Jarrett embarked on a new approach to performing: recitals consisting entirely of solo piano improvisations. The format, with little precedent in jazz beyond the work of Cecil Taylor, became Jarrett’s signature, and the means with which he rode to international stardom during his 18-concert tour of Europe in 1973. In 1975, a night of one such improvisation at the Opera House in Köln, Germany— henceforth known as the live recording The Köln Concert (ECM)—became what is still the best-selling piano album and best-selling solo jazz album of all time.
One year later, Jarrett came back to Japan, where he had previously toured with his quartet, for a series of much-lauded solo performances that were later released as The Sun Bear Concerts (ECM), named after a memorable discussion about the eponymous animal at a Japanese zoo. Encore from Tokyo is the moniker bestowed upon the improvisation that concluded the November 14, 1976 performance, on the tail end of that tour. (The version that Dinnerstein will perform tonight is a transcription, made with permission.) Its central feature is its opening figure, a calm ostinato—a repeating figure in the bass line common to music of the Baroque era—that holds steady throughout the work, feeding the melody through increasingly impassioned harmonic shifts. The work, at the conclusion, returns to its initial tranquility, the ostinato surrendering at last to a series of bell-like chords.
Jennifer Gersten is a violinist and writer from Queens, New York. Her reporting, essays, and criticism appear in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, and many other publications.