This weekend, thousands of musicians around the world have conspired to fill subway stations and public places with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, in celebration of the composer's 331st birthday on Monday.
The events, taking place March 19-21, are all part of Bach in the Subways, a movement that has spread like wildfire over the past six years.
It all started in 2010, when a cellist named Dale Henderson went on a mission to spread the music of Bach. He started by performing solo Bach Suites in various New York City subway stations. Instead of accepting money, Henderson gave away free postcards that invited his audience to continue to explore the music of Bach and classical music in general. The following year, Henderson invited other musicians to join him on Bach's birthday, March 21, 2011, and that was the beginning of an annual tradition, Bach in the Subways. Keep reading...
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When it comes to the musical concept of quick tempo, we all remember the hotshot players in high school who had an innate sense of virtuosic, daredevil speed. It seemed like every fiber in their being contributed to such breakneck playing: their personality, knowledge of the fingerboard, and mastery of memorization.
The flip-side of such an impressive demonstration was that their slow playing didn’t necessarily have the same persuasiveness. Some players are naturally fast and others are methodically, and carefully, slow. Music is constantly seeking the middle ground, and that’s why it’s both fascinating and endlessly challenging.
The component to rhythm that provides balance is called inertia. It makes certain that all cycles - the tiny phrases, the groups of sixteenth notes, the allowance for dynamic presence, etc. – have time to complete themselves. According to Wikipedia, “inertia is the resistance of any physical object to any change in its state of motion (this includes changes to its speed, direction or state of rest.) It is the tendency of objects to move in a straight line at constant velocity.” It’s not laziness, but the person who called laziness "inertia" was very clever. Inertia, for musicians, is the ballast that makes potential chaos run smoothly. Keep reading...
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Gil Shaham's ongoing 1930s Violin Concertos project is a lot more than a series of performances of likable pieces -- as the artist himself might lead one to believe. It's nothing less than a revelatory journey through an astonishing time in music history.
Shaham has recorded (and in some cases re-recorded) seven 1930s violin concertos with two albums released over the last few years: 1930s Violin Concertos, Vol. 1, with concertos by Samuel Barber (1939), Alban Berg (1935), Karl Hartmann (1939), Igor Stravinsky (1931) and Benjamin Britten (1939); and more recently, 1930s Violin Concertos, Vol. 2, with the second violin concertos of both Sergei Prokofiev (1935) and Bela Bartók (1938), which was released late last month. (There are more 1930s concertos: Arnold Schoenberg, Karol Szymanowski, Bohuslav Martinú, Darius Milhaud, Ernst Bloch, Paul Hindemith and William Walton, to name a few. He hasn't ruled out a Vol. 3.)
Perhaps due to the politics, displacement and despair of Depression-era, post-war, pre-war times, the 1930s also were a battleground for the soul of Western music. The works that Gil Shaham presents stand at the heart of that battle, in which composers sought both to cling to their disintegrating roots and to blow apart the traditions of the past, experimenting with the recently-invented 12-tone method, with atonality, and the rejection of Romanticism. These were messy times -- a lot like our own -- and the music is a reflection of that.
Shaham resists putting his enormous project into words; on more than one occasion he's said, with characteristic humor and humility, "Well, maybe it's just an excuse to play some of my favorite music!" But he speaks profoundly through the music itself and the lucidity of his expression. He's recorded a number of these works before -- his 1994 Barber recording; his recording of both Prokofiev concertos and solo sonata from 1996 and his Bartók Concerto No. 2 recording from 1999 with Pierre Boulez and the Chicago Symphony. It was hard for me to imagine how he could top those recordings, full of gorgeous tone and expression. But in these recent recordings, Shaham has found something beyond polish; they somehow have more humor, more subversiveness, more grit, maybe even more daring. Keep reading...
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