On March 18, 2012, Zuill Bailey gave a recital at Spokane’s St. John’s Cathedral of the first three Suites for Solo Cello by J.S. Bach. Many in the audience realized that we were present at something out of the ordinary. To be sure, the playing was very good – wonderful, really – but there was more than that: Bailey was playing quite deliberately for us, determined that we feel the majesty, sweetness and sorrow in that music as powerfully and completely as he did. By the time he finished playing, some of us in the audience had been changed for good, and left the church determined to be more open and honest in our approach to music, and certainly determined to hear more of Bailey.

Little did we realize that that afternoon recital forged the first link in a chain that has bound Bailey to Spokane’s civic and artistic life for the succeeding thirteen years and counting, as he transformed the Northwest Bach Festival into Northwest BachFest – one of the finest chamber music festivals in the country. The most recent link was the exceptionalrecital Bailey performed with pianist Greg Presley on Wednesday night at Hamilton Studio.

It was exceptional in part due to its very substantial program of challenging music: the Préludes from the very same Bach Cello Suites Bailey performed in 2012, two complete concertos – the “Concerto for Cello and Winds” by Jacques Ibert (1890-1962) and the First Cello Concerto of Camille Saint Saens (1835-1921) – as well as a group of popular encore pieces by Saint Saens, Rimsky-Korsakov, Jules Massenet and John Williams. Of greater note, and perhaps greater value was the autobiographical commentary offered by Bailey throughout the evening in which he explained the significance of each work in his own career and development as an artist.

The crucial figure in that development was Joel Krosnick, whose unexpected death at the age of 84 was announced on the day before Bailey’s concert. Krosnick, who was Bailey’s teacher at the Juilliard School and mentor for the rest of his life, was most widely known as the cellist of the Juilliard String Quartet, arguably the greatest ensemble of its kind in the latter half of the20th century and one of our country’s most significant contributions to the history of music. In Bailey’s mind, the theme of Wednesday’s concert changed on Tuesday.

What had been conceived of as a celebration of the cellist’s 40th year in the profession became a tribute to Krosnick’s unremitting adherence to the highest standards of artistic ethics. For Krosnick, the goal of the professional musician was to openas widely as possible the door admitting his or her audience to the joy of music. Period! Technical display for its own sake and other gambits by which a musician could increase his or her fame or bank account were to be regarded as distractions. Worse, they betrayed the promise each musician makes to the audience by simply walking onstage, and devalued the thousands of hours sacrificed to a career, not only by the artists themselves, but by their supportive family, teachers and friends.

In Bailey’s retelling, Krosnick took him on as a talented, skillful and ambitious young cellist and insisted that he make himself into much more by focusing on the impact he wished the music to make on his listeners, and subordinating all other considerations to that end. Krosnick insisted that Bailey “own every note,” and that is what we witnessed in every measure we heard on Wednesday night from the very beginning of the Bach G major Suite for Solo Cello, in which scarcely two phrases were alike, but were rather held differently to the light, exhibiting surprising differences in color, phrasing and articulation.

Bailey has recorded the six cello suites of Bach on two separate occasions, and the two versions are strikingly different, both from one another and from the performance at Hamilton Studio. What they all have in common, however, is total technical mastery, a determination to exploit the full resources of Bailey’s awesome Goffriller cello and a commitment to get his ego out of the way so that we might hear what Bach has to say.

This paradoxical blending of virtuosity and humility characterized Bailey’s rendition of all the works on Wednesday’s program, as different in style and structure as they were from one another.

(Well ... we might want to make an exception of the Rimsky-Korsakov “Flight of the Bumblebee,” which had much less to do with humility than good ol’ jaw-dropping virtuosity.) Much the same must be said for Greg Presley, whose contribution from the piano demonstrated the very same virtues. No mere provider of harmonic backdrop, Presley brought character, sensitivity and a broad variety of colors to an incredibly challenging assortment of scores, some of which – the Ibert Concerto, in particular – were not gratefully written for theinstrument.

As he graduated from Juilliard and contemplated with some anxiety the challenges that lay ahead, Bailey turned to Krosnick for advice. His mentor knew that Bailey had kept his distance from the Suites of Bach, feeling unready to tackle the works that are widely considered to stand at the pinnacle of all music composed for the cello.

Bailey said Krosnick told him that the time had come for him to engage the Bach Suites, and that, through them, he would find himself. Bailey went on to say that, indeed, he found not only himself through the Suites, and a secure commitment to his career in music, but also – and here his gaze swept over the audience – “through the Suites, I found ... you.”

You could have heard a pin drop.

For the weekend of March 1-2, Zuill Bailey arranged a family gathering. It was held at Barrister Winery and was called Northwest BachFest – an odd name for a family gathering, some might say, but, speaking to the audience on Sunday, Bailey made it clear he thought of everyone there as family and considered them “the best audience in the country.” When Bailey says something about an audience, one would do well to listen, for he has played to hundreds of them all over the world and does not hand out his estimates lightly.

Plainly, building on foundations laid by Beverly Biggs and David Dutton, Verne Wyndham, Gunther Schuller and others, Bailey and the musical public of Spokane have found in one another the spark of something special, something beyond entertainment or a pleasant way to spend the evening. It has changed life in our community, and it has changed Bailey.

It follows that one does not invite just anyone to join a family gathering, and so, Bailey has brought to the festival only those musicians among the thousands he has encountered in a career of 30 years whose musicianship he most respects, and whom he regards most highly and carries closest to his own heart. According to Bailey himself, none meet these standards more completely than violinist Kurt Nikkanen and his wife, pianist Maria Asteriadou. Since the early years of their careers, they have traveled the country and the world together playing solo and duet recitals.

Joining last weekend ’s duets and trios, the three friends treated the crowds at Barrister Winery to a celebration of chamber music – both of its beauty and its power. On Saturday, the program explored works by composers who were masters of the subtle nuance, the fleeting suggestion, the half-uttered question. All works on Saturday’s program were by French composers Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré with the addition of an encore by Jules Massenet. All these composers reacted against the emphasis popular in French music of the prior generation or two of grand gestures, grandiose orchestration and lush, exotic melody. Their music sought to provide, not the hyper-realistic image of beauty itself, but rather the impression it makes on a sensitive mind.

While likewise eschewing anything pompous or grandiose, Sunday’s concert turned to chamber music of a very different kind. It consisted not of five works, but of only two, but these two were of exceptional power and reach (and length), and none was French. One was by a German, Ludwig van Beethoven, and the other by a Russian, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. One is most famous for his mighty nine symphonies, and the other for a portfolio of overtures, symphonies, concertos and ballets that have no rival in their richness of melody, colorful brilliance and emotional force.

Of all Beethoven’s many works of chamber music, the one we heard on Sunday comes closest to his symphonies in its turbulent emotional energy. It is his Violin Sonata No. 9 in A Op. 47 (1802), which is always referred to as “The Kreutzer Sonata,” after the violinist who gave its first performance. It occupied the entire first half of the program, while the second was also filled with a single work: the Trio in A minor Op. 50, which Tchaikovsky seeks to imbue with all the volcanic energy and pathos he later went on to express in his final three symphonies. Both works, then, show their composers straining at, and by so doing, actually enlarging the bounds of what would thenceforward be expected from chamber music.

Such special music calls for special musicians; musicians who can command the fullest possible range of expression from their instruments, and yet are also willing and able to subordinate their individual egos to the goal of maintaining the balance with their colleagues intended by the composer. There are many recorded examples of imbalance between the performers of the Kreutzer Sonata, either with too deferential a violinist (Henryk Szeryng with Arthur Rubinstein, for example), or with a pianist not willing or not permitted to challenge the supremacy of the star violinist (e.g. Jascha Heifetz with anybody). Thus, we were fortunate to have two artists in Nikkanen and Asteriadou with both the chops to overwhelm their partner and the wisdom and experience not to.

Spokane audiences have been fortunate in hearing Nikkanen perform in both concertos and chamber music. No matter what the form of the music might have been or the era in which it was produced, Nikkanen has always exhibited a remarkable ability to focus attention on the music itself, rather than on how brilliantly he performs it. In this regard, his approach to the violin part of the Kreutzer Sonata was no different. The slow, ambiguous opening to the piece, played alone by the violin, was rendered as what it is – a tentative, uncertain exploration by the composer of how to initiate the challenging journey he has in mind – and not the silken demonstration of the violinist’s skill at double-stops (i.e. performing two voices on separate strings simultaneously). This tentative mood was mirrored perfectly by Asteriadou when she engaged the violin in the tentative, halting dialogue with which Beethoven resolves with a characteristically abrupt and riveting shift into the vehement but mercurial, rapidly fluctuating allegro that makes up the remainder of the movement. The musical ping-pong that follows requires both players to step suddenly to center stage, only to move aside just as quickly to allow their partner to make their point.

Though Asteriadou kept her focus firmly on the ebb and flow of Beethoven’s argument, it was impossible not to take note of the enormous resources she had to invest in this performance. As I remarked at the time of her last appearance here in the Messiaen “Quartet for the End of Time,” there seems to be no limit to the variety of colors she commands, and the Beethoven Sonata allowed her to display even more fully the singing quality of her tone. After the interval, when she returned to the stage with Nikkanen and Bailey and launched into the vast depths of the Tchaikovsky Trio, it seemed that she had changed pianos, so distinctly did the tone she produced differ from what we heard in the Beethoven. As if by magic, it became darker, fuller and more resonant, in keeping with the change in period from Beethoven’s classicism to Tchaikovsky’s passionate romanticism.

It seems that, when urged by his beloved patron and confidant, Nadezhda von Meck, to write a piano trio, Tchaikovsky firmly resisted, claiming he thoroughly disliked that instrumental combination, and insisting he was by nature happier in larger forms and larger ensembles. It should be recalled that Tchaikovsky is the composer of the most famous and popular of all piano concertos, one of the very best known of all violin concertos, as well as a virtuoso showpiece that is in the repertoire of every professional cellist: his “Variations on a Rococo Theme.” It seems that he resolved his disagreement with Madame von Meck by reimagining what a piano trio could be. Try to picture the task of overlaying the B-flat minor Piano Concerto with the D major Violin Concerto and adding to the result the “Roccoco Variations” and you will have some idea of what Bailey, Nikkanen and Asteriadou confronted when they played the A minor Trio of Tchaikovsky. You will also get an inkling of the wealth of melody and ceaseless flux of feeling lavished on the audience. From the soulful melancholy of the opening theme, sung out thrillingly by Bailey, to the kaleidoscopic set of variations concluding the work, during which scenes from “The Nutcracker” and “Sleeping Beauty” are paraded through the minds of the listeners, the three musicians took on a challenge ordinarily confronted by 100 players. They triumphed. It was no doubt exhausting for them, but for us, exhilarating.