This article is reprinted with the permission of the author and The Spokesman-Review.
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Johann Sebastian Bach was surely the greatest keyboard player of his time, perhaps of any time. The Northwest Bach Festival brought in two outstandingly fine keyboardists to remind us of just how great Bach's keyboard music is.
The festival opened its 20th season Friday with an event that seemed, on first sight, downright controversial - a piano recital. Any potential controversy over the choice of the piano for Bach was silenced by the beauty of the playing of Veronica Jochum in her all-Bach recital at The Met.
Jochum's program displayed a wide variety of Bach's keyboard styles: dance styles in the English Suite No. 6 and the French Suite No. 5, and his improvisatory manner in the Toccata in G minor. She also included two bold and beautiful transcriptions by Ferruccio Busoni of Bach's music for other instruments, the Chaconne for solo violin and the organ chorale prelude "Sleepers Awake."
Jochum's performance was a reminder of the time, 50 years ago and more, when great concert pianists played Bach - both original music and in transcriptions - almost as a matter of habit. Then the early music purists convinced us that Bach's keyboard music should be heard only on the kind of instruments he played - the harpsichord, clavichord and organ. Bach on the piano was left to students and a few hard souls among concert pianists such as the late Glenn Gould and nowadays Alfred Brendel and Andras Schiff.
Jochum showed us just what we have been missing. She created phrases shaped as beautifully as a great singer might, and she provided a kaleidoscope of rich tone colors made possible by thoughtful control of the piano's great range of loud and soft. She made generous and skilled use of the piano's "soul" (to use Chopin's word) - the sustaining pedal.
But most prominent in Jochum's Bach playing was its natural expressiveness, whether in the blissful contentment of the Allemande of French Suite, the demonic energy of the Gigue of the English Suite or in the mounting drama of the Bach-Busoni Chaconne.
The pianist responded to audience enthusiasm with encores, the Minuet and Guige by Mozart and with her own transcription of Bach's deeply moving chorale prelude "O Mensch bewein' dein Sunde gross."
Sunday afternoon, James David Christie matched the skill and expressiveness of his acclaimed performance at last year's festival with his organ recitals at St. John's Cathedral. Christie's program showed three of Bach's greatest organ works in the context of works by composers who influenced him and a piece by J.L. Krebs, one of Bach's students. Like Jochum, Christie also played a transcription, proving that Bach's harpsichord Toccata in D major fits the organ like a sleek glove.
The organ at St John's does not take naturally tot he music of Bach; its vast range of symphonically colorful sound is better suited to 19th- and 20th-century music of Widor, Vierne and Messiaen, but Christie can be coaxed into great Bachian sounds, and pre-Bachian sounds, too.
Christie began with Georg Bochm's rousing Preludium in C major with its long opening solo for pedals that surely must have encouraged Bach to exploit fancy footwork in his own music. Similarly, Christie showed how two other earlier organists, Dietrich Buxtehude and Johann Pachelbel, led the way toward Bach's ability to turn short, simple ideas into grand structures.
What I found most compelling about Christie playing was the extraordinary variety of articulation - the infinite ways one note is either separated from or overlaps with another - he uses to create expression. The denser the music becomes, the more Christie uses a variety of articulation to clarify each strand of the texture. This he demonstrated magnificently in complexities of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E minor ("The Wedge") and in the virtuoso display of the Fantasie and Fugue in G minor.
Christie treated the audience to J.P. Sweelick's jaunty little pavan, "Malle Sijmen" (Simple Simon) as an encore.
Ardent performances such as Jochum's and Christie's give the 20th year of Northwest Bach Festival real cause for celebration.
By Travis Rivers
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