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Solo string compositions have the spotlight at Bach Festival

By Eric McHenry

Everybody gets birthday parties. Important people get posthumous birthday parties. But the hallmark of transcendent greatness may be a celebration on the anniversary of a death; it’s a tribute reserved for the truly monumental.

Boston University will pay Johann Sebastian Bach such a tribute December 3 through 6 with a series of concerts at the Tsai Performance Center. He died in 1750.

	Michelle LaCourse

"I suppose it’s unfortunate that it’s the 250th anniversary of his death, as opposed to his birth," says Michelle LaCourse, an esteemed violist and SFA associate professor of music. "We musicians just jump on any of these big anniversaries, because it’s an opportunity to do a whole lot of Bach’s music at once."

Bach was a prolific composer all his life, and a four-concert series that attempted to represent his oeuvre would be elliptical at best. BU’s Bach Festival will have as its focal point Bach’s solo string compositions, produced during an especially fertile period at Cöthen, where he served as Kapellmeister and director of the Kammermusik to Prince Leopold of Anhalt. It will feature performances by members of the Muir String Quartet, BU’s acclaimed quartet-in-residence, along with LaCourse and Michele Levin, winner of the Johann Sebastian Bach International Piano Competition.

"In Cöthen," says LaCourse, "he produced all of the cello suites, the violin sonatas and partitas, the gamba sonatas, and all of the Brandenburg concertos, and that’s only a small portion of the music he composed during his six years there. He really went wild with instrumental music."

On Sunday, December 3, accompanied by a chamber ensemble, LaCourse and Steven Ansell will play Bach’s famous Brandenburg Concerto No. 6. Ansell, SFA associate professor, Muir violist, and principal violist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, will also join Levin for performances of Bach’s three sonatas for viola da gamba (an ancestor of the viola) and harpsichord, transcribed for viola and piano.

Members of the Muir String Quartet – (clockwise from upper left) violist Steven Ansell, cellist Michael Reynolds, and violinists Peter Zazofsky and Lucia Lin – figure prominently in BU’s upcoming Bach Festival. Ansell, Reynolds, and Zazofsky will all be featured soloists in the four-day concert series. Photo by Susan Wilson

Muir violinist and SFA Associate Professor Peter Zazofsky will perform Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas for solo violin on Monday, December 4. During one of the concert’s two intermissions, Zazofsky and John Daverio, SFA professor and chairman of the department of music history and literature, will deliver a short lecture on Bach’s violin compositions. The festival’s third concert, Tuesday evening, will feature Michael Reynolds, founding cellist of the Muir String Quartet and SFA associate professor of music, playing Bach’s six suites for solo cello. Reynolds has won considerable praise for his recordings of the suites.

"What is both wonderful and challenging about the unaccompanied pieces," says LaCourse, "is that with no keyboard partner, one solo string player creates melody, harmony, rhythm, color, texture, and very often multiple voices. They’re all fantastic pieces of music. Each one is a masterwork. And they all provide numerous technical challenges to the string player. Many string teachers say that solo Bach is where we learn to use the bow."

The winners of a student competition will give the festival a special coda on Wednesday, December 6, with their own renderings of Bach’s unaccompanied string works. Their proficiency with Bach, LaCourse says, is both another touchstone of the composer’s greatness and a feather in SFA’s cap.

"I would say that most serious string students are working on some movement of some Bach piece almost all of the time," she says. "And we do have some wonderful students here. The concert of the student winners will really give them a chance to shine."

Boston University Bach Festival concerts will take place at 7 p.m. in the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Ave., except for the student competition winners’ performance, which will be held at 8:30 p.m. in the SFA Concert Hall. All events are free and open to the public. For more information, call 353-8724.

7 December 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations