For the most part, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center handles premieres like volatile substances: New works are usually played in the safe confines of the Rose Studio, far from Alice Tully Hall, the society’s main auditorium. But last weekend, a sold-out holiday program in Alice Tully opened with the debut of two works by a teenage composer.
The composer was not in attendance — understandably, given that he had been dead for 275 years. The reason his works were given their New York concert premiere on such an august stage had less to do with their quality than with the fact that they were attributed — only last month, at a pomp-filled ceremony — to Johann Sebastian Bach.
The musicologist Peter Wollny discovered the Ciacona and Fuga in D minor and the Ciacona in G minor in 1992 in a Brussels archive, and then spent the next three decades gathering evidence that traced the anonymous manuscript to a pupil of Bach’s in Arnstadt around 1705. As a tale of scholarly intuition and faith rewarded, it is undeniably moving. But listening to Paolo Bordignon coax the works to life with colorful registrations on the handsome Alice Tully organ, I kept thinking that perhaps the attribution process would have been faster if the works in question had been a little more earth shattering.
Bach’s architectural clarity comes through in both pieces, which unfold as variations built on a repeating bass line. Their stately elegance and the figurations that bring variety to an otherwise predictable progression of harmonies are lovely, but hardly groundbreaking. Dieterich Buxtehude, whom Bach greatly admired, comes to mind.
Still, the fugue built into the D minor chaconne is an original move and points to Bach’s lifelong fascination with these musical puzzles in which interlocking strands of melody form and resolve ever-new harmonic knots. When the theme of that chaconne returns after the rhythmic restlessness of the fugue, its square solidity registers as a satisfying arrival.
The rest of Sunday’s celebration of Baroque violin music offered polished performances of tried-and-true favorites. It culminated in a vivacious round-robin reading of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” with four violinists — Chad Hoopes, Julian Rhee, Kristin Lee and Richard Lin — as soloists. Here and there, they were able to uncover new details in these endlessly overexposed works: the barking dog in the slow movement of “Spring” rendered with delightful vigor by the violist James Thompson; inebriated hiccups in the harvest revelry of “Fall.”
The emotional heart of the concert was Arnaud Sussmann’s performance of Bach’s Violin Concerto in E with its deeply affecting Adagio. Written in 1730, a quarter century after the two newly attributed pieces for organ, it brought home the genius of the mature Bach to infuse lucid structures with deep meaning.
But a work doesn’t have to sound sensational to cause a sensation. On YouTube, where you can hear the two pieces played by Ton Koopman as the manuscripts scroll alongside, the comments section bubbles with giddy delight. “Been waiting for this artist to drop another banger for a while now,” declares one commenter. Another quips: “Bro got tired of decomposing and said he’d rather compose.”
It’s easy to dismiss the frenzy around new works by dead composers as more evidence of classical music’s terminal attachment to hero worship. Last year that same impulse whipped up excitement in the classical industry over a docile serenade newly attributed to Mozart and a rediscovered waltz by Chopin. But there is also something pure in this kind of devotion. For a certain universe of listeners, dead masters inspire pop levels of fandom, and a new release feels nothing short of miraculous.
In that spirit, I’m with the commenter who, mindful of Bach’s sway over the centuries, wrote: “Now we gotta wait for the response of Beethoven.”
The post Review: Two New Bach Pieces? The Real Thrill Was in the Chase. appeared first on New York Times.
