St Petersburg, Concert Hall

Bachiana


PERFORMERS:
Olga Trifonova (soprano)
David Geringas (cello)
Musicians of the Mariinsky Orchestra cello section


PROGRAMME:
Johann Sebastian Bach
Six Suites for Cello Solo, BWV 1007–1012

Mindaugas Urbaitis
Bach-Variations II for six cellos

Heitor Villa-Lobos
Bachiana brasileira No 5 for soprano and eight cellos
Bachiana brasileira No 1 for eight cellos


Johann Sebastian Bach composed his six suites for solo cello around 1720 in Köthen. Even today the suites remain a benchmark which composers writing for unaccompanied cello strive to equal (including, from the 20th century, Max Reger, Paul Hindemith and Zoltán Kodály to name but a few).
Bach’s suites are radically innovative. Music without basso continuo accompaniment was rather rare at the time, especially for the cello. It was only in the late 17th century at the court of Francesco d’Este, Duke of Modena, that the “explosion” suddenly occurred – there appeared several books of sonatas and ricercars for solo cello by Giuseppe Colombi, Domenico Galli, Giovanni Battista degli Antonii and Domenico Gabrielli. Against this background it is clear just how very revolutionary Bach’s essays into the genre were. Italians wrote for the cello using strictly one voice – multi-voice compositions were written for the viola da gamba with its six or, at times, seven strings. Bach did the very reverse: in his sonatas for viola da gamba he gave the instrument one melodic line, while he composed his cello suites with chords and hidden polyphony, thus creating a structure of hitherto unknown complexity. It was a breakthrough and a true challenge thrown down to the performers. It turned out that Bach would determine the future.
The suites have a rigid structure: each consists of a prelude, allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue. Between the sarabande and gigue in the first two suites there are minuets, while in the next two there are bourrées and, in the final two, there are gavottes. For the fifth suite (in C Minor) Bach proposed that the performers tune the A string a tone lower, while the imperially luxurious sixth suite (in D Minor) was meant to be performed by them on a five-string cello, in the 18th century as common as the four-string instrument is to us and which facilitated freer performances in a high register.
Heitor Villa-Lobos’ nine Bachianas brasileiras were created as a tribute to Bach. They form nine suites for differing ensembles of performers, from piano to chorus and orchestra, and were written between 1930 and 1945. Two that are connected with Villa-Lobos’ favourite instrument – the cello – are performed more frequently than the others. Bachiana No 1, comprising an introduction, prelude and fugue, is closest of all to Bach’s own imagery. The composer dedicated it to Pablo Casals who introduced him to Bach’s suites. In creating his own – new – genre Villa-Lobos bade farewell to the stormy and experimentation-filled 1920s and entered the period of neoclassicism.
The sources of Bachiana No 5 are not connected with just Bach and Brazil: Villa-Lobos sought inspiration in listening not only to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti but also to Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise. The first movement is Ária to lyrics by Ruth Valadares Corrêa, the first performer of the work. Her romantic verse is about the rising moon. The lyrics of the second movement (Dança) were written by the poet Manuel Bandeira who took the birds of Brazil for his theme – naturally, Villa-Lobos included “bird-like” intonations in his music.
The Bach of Lithuanian composer Mindaugas Urbaitis is the Bach of the age of postmodernism. Urbaitis, who has worked a great deal where different genres converge, has written music for theatre, the film industry and animation and came naturally to minimalism via rock music, while during the age of arrangements and remakes (“when everything already existed”) he turned to the music of past years. His works include Recycling Tango (1998), Der Fall Wagner (1999) and Bach-Variations I for four violins (1988). Bach-Variations II for six cellos (2000) was commissioned by the German pavilion for Expo 2000 in Hannover. The work was first performed by David Geringas and his students. The variations use thematic material from Bach’s cello suites, which have only increased in value over the course of almost the whole three last centuries.
Anna Bulycheva

Age category 6+

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