Second Monday Music: Johann Sebastian Bach performed in Memphis

Six suites for unaccompanied cello

By André Duvall

On Sunday afternoon, February 1, I had the pleasure of hearing all six of Johann Sebastian Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello performed live in succession. Brazilian native Leonardo Altino, an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Memphis, presented these masterpieces in the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music’s Harris Recital Hall.
        Although I am not a cellist, the moment I heard about this concert via a local “Checking on the Arts” interview on our classical radio station, I was determined to make my best efforts to attend. The admiration and awe I experience when listening to and studying works by Johann Sebastian Bach for keyboard instruments is amplified when I hear works he composed for other instruments, and vice versa. Moreover, I have always delighted in hearing the various qualities of sound of the cello played in its different registers.
    It is not often that one has the opportunity to hear live performances of complete sets of works by Bach, who in a sense was often encyclopedic in his compositional output with regard to selection of genres, keys, forms, and compositional procedures (a well-known example is The Well-Tempered Clavier, in which he composed a prelude and fugue for keyboard in every key, major and minor, twice over). Such performances often span multiple concerts over a long period time, or at least include multiple performers, due to the sheer volume and intricacy of the music to be prepared. For instance, eight concerts held in Nashville over the course of two years featured the complete Well-Tempered Clavier performed in conjunction with unrelated works. I managed to drive to Nashville to hear five of the eight.
    The suites, like most suites written in the Baroque period, are each composed of dance movements. Many of Bach’s suites for instruments are actually stylized dance compositions. Thus, while the individual movements contain certain characteristics of the dances they are named after, they may diverge from an actual dance piece in various ways, often including increased complexity. Particularly with Bach, the original sense of the dance may be embedded within many layers of embellishment, intricate rhythms, and elaborate metrical and contrapuntal nuances. Bach’s dances are sophisticated, artful manifestations of simpler yet engaging musical dance constructions. Some typical baroque dances found in suites include the allemande, the courante, the sarabande, and the gigue. Composers sometimes include additional dances such as minuets or gavottes, and may choose to introduce a suite with a prelude. Each dance has characteristic organizations of strong and weak beats, often has hallmark rhythmic patterns, and these traits can vary according to national origin.

Altino chose to share with the audience some of his decisions regarding performance practice. He described his choices as being a mixture of historical and modern approaches, combining the ideas he feels Bach was trying to convey with his own feelings and ideas about the music. Baroque cellos did not have endpins, and used gut strings. Altino played the suites using a modern cello, with metal strings and an endpin. However, he prepared the pieces using a Baroque bow, which has both aural and technical implications. The cellist does not use as much power, and the resultant sound is different.
    There is strong evidence that suggests that the final suite was written for a cello with an extra string. Not having such an instrument at his disposal, Altino, like many modern performers, played the suite without the extra string, which required extra technical mastery. For the fifth suite, however, Altino chose to follow the original writing by tuning one of his strings lower (a specific example of a practice called scordatura). Altino thus left the stage before and after this suite to make the necessary adjustments in tuning.
    For reasons of practicality, Altino chose to omit many of the repeats, which are ubiquitous in the dance-inspired genre of the Baroque suite for any instrument. The concert began at 3:00 p.m., and with a delay in starting and an ample intermission, did not conclude until after 5:00. Had he kept the repeats, the concert would have lasted much longer. I wouldn’t have minded staying to hear the repeats (which can allow the performer to make small embellishments on the second go), but he was wise to choose the omissions in order to retain his modern-day, time-conscious audience.

A special, extramusical aspect of this performance was Altino’s choice of lighting. He gave his opening comments using normal stage and house lighting, but then chose to darken the stage, performing the first four suites while lit by a single, yellow-white stage light shining at an angle from stage-left. Altino thus appeared mostly as a silhouette, with his face halfway in darkness and halfway in partial light. I found the lighting to be effective not only in setting a contemplative and respectful mood for the purity and quality of the music, but also in allowing my ear and mind to focus on that purity and sense of unity that seems so much at the core of Bach’s music. There was no need to see lots of body movement from the performer. Seeing the shadow of an arm moving in the low-light was enough. During the fifth-suite (one of two in a minor key, both of which convey a darker mood to Altino’s ear), Altino chose a single blue light to perform under. For the final suite, he again used a white light, but one with greater luminosity, and which covered a greater area of the stage than the previous white-yellow light. This complemented well the joyful, ringing nature of the final suite.
    I found the performance itself to be incredibly beautiful, wrought with emotion, intellectually pleasing, and very well-prepared. I attended this concert with a good friend of mine who is a fine cellist and a former student of Altino, who concurred on all accounts. I cannot speak about detailed technical aspects related to cello performance with the expertise that someone like Moristotle & Co. columnist and cellist Geoffrey Dean can, but as a musician and admirer of Bach, I thoroughly enjoyed the performance.

Copyright © 2015 by André Duvall