(++++) OLD BACH AND NEW

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 4; Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3; Concerto for Oboe and Violin; Telemann: Suite from “Don Quixote”; Vivaldi/Sorrell: La Folia (“Madness”). Apollo’s Fire conducted by Jeannette Sorrell. AVIE. $19.99.

Busoni: Piano Music; Bach/Busoni: Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903; Liszt/Busoni: Fantasie über Zwei Motive aus W.A. Mozarts “Die Hochzeit des Figaro.” Jiayan Sun, piano. Bridge Records. $16.99.

Schumann: Carnaval, Op. 9; Papillons, Op. 2; Intermezzi, Op. 4; “Abegg” Variations, Op. 1. Charles Owen, piano. AVIE. $19.99.

     After Johann Sebastian Bach’s death in 1750, as his sons’ stars were in the ascendant – especially those of Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian Bach – the family patriarch was sometimes referred to dismissively as “old Bach.” Yet as wonderful as many works of Bach’s sons proved to be, it is the music of “old Bach” that proved ever-new to succeeding generations after the time of his sons had passed, and that remains influential, beloved and respected down to the present day. The “respect” element, it is true, sometimes leads to performances that are on the dry side and that seem more concerned with preserving the formulaic aspects of J.S. Bach’s musical structures than engaging with the music on a more-intimate, more-emotional level. It takes period-instrument ensembles as good as Apollo’s Fire – which is to say ones that are very good indeed – to go beyond formula and showcase the ways in which “old Bach” simply used forms for their expressive and developmental potential rather than employing them as scaffolding for its own sake. It is precisely because Bach absorbed formal structures without being bound by them that his music proved so attractive to other composers in his own time and long afterwards, the “old Bach” moniker notwithstanding. A new AVIE recording by Apollo’s Fire under Jeannette Sorrell provides some delightful musical juxtapositions anchored in Bach’s own time, while a Bridge Records release focusing on the music of Ferruccio Busoni shows some significant ways in which Bach’s influence not only persisted but, if anything, increased over the years.

     The Sorrell disc opens with a light and lively rendition of Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, the fine flute playing highlighted throughout and the emotional expressiveness of the central Andante proving highly effective before the exuberant bounce of the concluding Presto. This is followed by expressiveness of a different sort in the Suite from “Don Quixote” by Bach’s contemporary Telemann, who both influenced “old Bach” and was strongly influenced by him. Being essentially self-taught, Telemann was less bound by musical conventions than many of his contemporaries, a state of affairs that allowed him a level of expressiveness unusual for his time and especially evident here in Le réveil de Quichotte and Ses soupirs amoureux après la Princesse Dulcinée. Sorrell and Apollo’s Fire are especially effective in contrasting these warmer and gentler elements of Telemann’s suite with the ebullient ones, such as Son attaque des moulins à vent. Next is a return to Bach’s music, the “Air on a G String” from his third orchestral suite – serving here as a kind of palate cleanser before the ensemble proceeds to the Concerto for Oboe and Violin, BWV 1060. Reconstructed from what is thought to have originally been a work for two harpsichords, this concerto is notable for the differing emphases of its movements: the middle one makes the solo instruments essentially equal partners, while the finale gives the violin considerably greater scope than the oboe receives. The pacing and ornamentation in this performance are particularly well-considered, and the playing is sensitively handled throughout. Then, as an encore, Sorrell presents her arrangement of the “La Folia” movement from Vivaldi’s Trio Sonata in D minor, Op. 1, No. 12, RV 63 – Vivaldi being another composer whose music is intertwined with that of Bach, while the “La Folia” theme shows both composers’ connection to their shared past, the theme already being old and well-known when Vivaldi used it.

     The Sorrell disc, although somewhat scattershot, is enchanting because of the numerous ways in which it explores and explicates the realm of Bach’s influence in his own lifetime. Jiayan Sun’s exploration of Busoni does something similar for a much later time period. The compositional designation “Bach/Busoni” is actually a common one, Busoni having done many adaptations and arrangements of music by Bach. Sun opens the CD with one of these, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903, which Busoni edited in 1915. Hearing Busoni’s handling of this work paves the way for a series of pieces by Busoni that are heavily influenced by Bach even when they are not actual transcriptions or arrangements. These are Busoni’s Toccata, BV 287; Elegy No. 7, BV 252—Berceuse; and Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach, BV 253. Sun is fully equal to the considerable virtuosic demands of these works, presenting them in a way that showcases Busoni’s often-very-intense style while also displaying his sensitivity to some elements (if not all) that Bach brought to his music. Sun’s interest on this disc is exploring a variety of influences on Busoni’s music, not only that of Bach, so after displaying the Bach-related material, he moves on to equally convincing presentations of other material. He offers the rhythmically irregular and harmonically ambiguous Indianisches Tagebuch, Book 1, BV 267, in a closely detailed presentation that showcases the forward-looking elements of this 1915 work while still bringing forth the lyricism of the third of its four sections, a pleasant if slightly halting Andante. Next, Sun performs Busoni’s Sonatina No. 6: Kammer-Fantasie über Bizets “Carmen,” BV 284, a work from 1920 that shows the composer’s late style and his indebtedness to the “display pieces” offered by the great composer/pianists of the 19^th century. The greatest of those, by most estimations, was Liszt, and to show that Liszt was another significant influence on Busoni, Sun plays Liszt’s 1842 Fantasie über Zwei Motive aus W.A. Mozarts “Die Hochzeit des Figaro,” as edited by Busoni in 1912. A typically impressive Liszt thematic exploration, which spins out essentially delicate elements of The Marriage of Figaro into 15 minutes filled with fireworks, this piece is impressive both for showing how well Liszt absorbed Mozart’s framework and made it his own, and how Busoni handled Liszt with as much care and sensitivity as he brought to Bach. The CD concludes with a very short work that reaches directly back from Busoni to Mozart and that pianists other than Sun have also chosen as an encore: Variations-Studie nach Mozart, 1, from Busoni’s Klavierübung, based on the serenade from Don Giovanni. The CD is certainly worthwhile for listeners interested in Busoni’s piano music and some of the influences upon it – and it is also interesting for demonstrating the ways in which the music of “old Bach” became the basis of new musical thinking through the 19^th century and into the 20^th.

     The “Bach/Busoni” designation may be well-known, but one would be hard-pressed to look around for anything listed as “Bach/Schumann.” Yet Bach’s influence on Schumann was substantial, going well beyond Schumann’s only organ work, Six Fugues on the Name Bach, Op. 60 (1845). For one thing, Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 is absolutely packed with Bach-related material: Schumann studied Bach intensely when recuperating from one of his bouts of severe mental illness, in 1844, and included the musical equivalent of Bach’s name (B flat-A-C-B natural) in the second movement – plus several references to Bach’s Musical Offering. Even before writing these works, Schumann had been profoundly influenced by Bach and had adapted many Bach techniques of quotations and references to other works. A new AVIE disc featuring early Schumann piano music played by Charles Owen shows some of these techniques already clearly present in Schumann’s first two published pieces, “Abegg” Variations, Op. 1 and Papillons, Op. 2. Owen presents the gently lyrical “Abegg” theme and the five contrasting variations attentively and without making the piece out to be more grandiose than it is, and handles Papillons similarly: the work’s 12 movements are essentially independent of each other, many being one-minute-or-less miniatures and only the last two lasting longer than two minutes apiece. Most of the dances are waltzes, and Owen does a fine job of maintaining the three-quarter-time material while also putting the ornamentation of many movements clearly on display. The six Intermezzi, Op. 4 are more varied in form and duration, and Owen effectively showcases the somewhat larger canvas on which Schumann worked here, with the Presto a capriccio, oddly leaping Allegro marcato, and fantasia-like concluding Allegro coming across particularly well. As for Carnaval, Op. 9, which is actually heard first on this disc, Owen presents its 21 little movements with close attention to its recurring motifs and codes, but above all with musical attentiveness: the deliberate rhythmic awkwardness of some sections contrasts very well with the pure lyricism of others (Arlequin with Valse noble, for example), and the work as a whole neatly evokes not only carnival tropes but also such real-world characters as Clara Schumann and Chopin (who did not think much of Schumann’s music). The performance is a pleasant and largely unassuming one, and in that way fits the music very well indeed, without overstating anything or trying to turn the piece into one of grand gestures. These early Schumann piano works do not show Bach’s influence as clearly as do some subsequent ones, but all use techniques – including ones derived from Bach – that Schumann would later develop and refine as he discovered more ways in which “old Bach” remained relevant to Schumann’s own time, just as Busoni would later find him relevant to a still-later era.