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Every Broadway Bach Ensemble concert I’ve played in has been a
revelation on numerous counts: the simplest of which is that it’s introduced me
to so much rep over the 31 years (1987 –
2018) I’ve played with the orchestra. Those years describe the timeline of the
main highway of my so-called adult life (my 30s through 60s, good lord), and it
stands as a powerful reminder that the greatest openings to new dimensions
aren’t limited to your first five years on the planet. It’s also at the heart
of why I am so besotted with this city. New York gave birth to all this – and
therefore to me.
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Broadway Bach’s latest new feast will be served tomorrow at
2 p.m., Sunday, February 4, at the Broadway Presbyterian Church at 114th
Street and Broadway across from Columbia University (No. 1 train to 116th
street will put you right there). The program consists entirely of American
music by three composers, two of them living, both of whom will be at the
concert, and one of them – Victoria Bond – who’ll be conducting it all. The
works include three premieres in this country, a piece by Victoria Bond with
narration provided by WQXR’s Annie Bergen called ‘Thinking Like a Mountain,”
and two works by Jonathan Tunick, famous for orchestrating and providing
orchestral arrangements of all of Stephen Sondheim’s music, one of which, “A
Little Night Music,” we’ll be playing tomorrow. We’ll also be playing his three
movement work “Cheever Country,” music written for PBS’ production of three of
John Cheever’s tales. Our fourth American composer is Aaron Copland, whose
Billy the Kid will close the program.
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I’m trying to think what I can tell you usefully from the
point of view of a violinist in the orchestra, an angle of approach which like
every angle has its clarities and its blindnesses. One clarity I can pass on is
that in the almost absurdly few rehearsals the orchestra undergoes for each
performance, we often start with a devastating sense we won’t be able to bring
it off – but then so far always reach a surprising moment around about the
third rehearsal (of the five we have; the first of which is a harrowing string
section rehearsal where fiddlers’ significant sins are brutally revealed: it
hurts but we need it) – a moment where the magic happens and the concert
coalesces and we know we’ll have something to share.
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The nature of that magic for me in this concert has to do
with the Americanness of its rich repast. Henry James bemoaned America’s lack
of history and provenance because he felt it was such an impediment even to the
possibility of creating truly dimensional art. But that can’t be said about
this round-up of artists on the evidence of their pieces here.
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Sondheim has never seemed more fluent and engaging and
moving than in Mr. Tunick’s arrangement of “A Little Night Music”. Victoria
Bond’s “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which takes its title from an Aldo Leopold
essay “about the balance of nature and our
ethical relationship towards its preservation” as Ms. Bond describes it, manages
to bring the spirit of that celebration of Nature to life here in remarkable
ways. I’m honored to be playing the violin version of a bird who soars over that
mountain, whose song begins the piece – an extended solo that will forever be dear to the
heart of any violinist since it gives the fiddle the chance to do what it was
invented for. For some reason I was initially so thrown by this opportunity
that at our first orchestral rehearsal I became a very lost bird indeed: one who’d
lost any capacity to count beats. I gave Ms. Bond some very unhappy moments.
But the bird has come round and the piece, with narration from Leopold’s essay provided
by Annie Bergen, achieves, I think, its variety of aims with not a little
grace, something this gorgeous work more than deserves.
Jonathan Tunick’s three pieces aligning
with Cheever’s stories are truly remarkable. He’s managed to recreate the
sophistication of a Cheever tale, with its anguishes mostly covered by the gleam
of what is held to be the Good Life by the highly educated well-off Westchester
suburban contingent. It would be so easy to do a send-up of it – but Mr. Tunick
finds exactly the right musical place in it to tug at the heart, to give it
weight and power. It’s as wonderfully surprising somehow as it is successful.
Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid is a fine
business, too. I offer a taste of it here in the short vid of me playing a
swatch of the second violin part of the penultimate section, “Billy’s Death,” along with a recording of Copland conducting the London Symphony, because to me
it suggests the apotheosis of Copland’s harmonic essence and presence –
the signature of his musical soul. He really all but invented “American” music:
its children include so many of the works of Samuel Barber and Leonard
Bernstein. This touching section about Billy’s death to my mind also ushers in
the heart of how Copland has emotionally shaped our own American hearts with its
plangency. Its harmonic grammar seems to me as modal as anything in Thomas
Tallis: a transcendently American mode which immediately identifies its
composer and so much of the poignancy we feel in our American lives. He gave us
a language for it.
Do come to hear us and indeed to meet us
(Ms. Bond and Mr. Tunick included) tomorrow if you can. For my part, I’ll do my
best to insure that the bird Ms. Bond has consigned to my care soars as freely
and gladly as possible over that thinking mountain.
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