by Anthony Martin
This Saturday, November 19, violinist Anthony Martin and harpsichordist Katherine Heater collaborate on an astonishingly rich and diverse concert of old and new music. Their program will include everything from J.S. and C.P.E. Bach to Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Ligeti! Anthony Martin elaborates on this most adventuresome program.
During the past four centuries the repertoire of violinists and keyboard players has been all-inclusive, including popular songs, dance tunes, and mashups of various sorts, as well as the more abstract sonata. In the past century it has even doubled back on itself to include music of the past as well as the present. While we accept the conventional violin and piano recital which progresses from Bach through Beethoven, to end with Brahms or Bartók, we may not be accustomed to being served a similar flight of old and new wine from harpsichord and baroque violin. But this program unapologetically offers music from the early 18th through the early 21st centuries played on two instruments that have not progressed beyond their 18th-century forms. Of course, keyboard and fingerboard instruments have changed since then, and have continued to change beyond the forms that we are most familiar with—witness the electric keyboard and violin that can fill a baseball stadium with sound!
We suggest that the old containers (the musical instruments and musical materials of baroque times) are entirely adequate to the new wine of the more recent past. Let us not attend merely to the bottles, but to the wine as well! Or, perhaps more accurately, to the whisky which is given flavor by the container in which it ages, for surely the flavor of a piece of music is influenced by the tone colors of the instruments used to convey its compositional message.
The three Bach pieces that are the alpha, mu, and omega of the program are mashups, or perhaps hybrids. Ron McKean’s What Solemn Sound leads directly to J.S. Bach’s E-minor continuo sonata, with the first page of continuo written for us by Ron. C.P.E. Bach’s Empfindungen (Sensibilities) is his own fitting of a violin part to his previously composed Free Fantasy in F# minor, with a newly composed closing section. J.S. Bach’s Gavotte in E owes its keyboard part to Fritz Kreisler. Fitted among these three representatives of the Old are various conjunctions of later music. The earliest, ironically, is the piece Schoenberg wrote as a self-taught teenager, before he became the Schoenberg we love to hate. The Milhaud and the Schnittke were actually written for violin and harpsichord, although not the baroque versions of those instruments that we play. The Couperin and the Ligeti are both examples of extreme virtuosity written specifically for harpsichord. Stravinsky, Hindemith, Hendricks, and Ravel each wrote a wistful salut to the past, evoking nostalgia for the Old while remaining true to the New.
The concert takes place at Trinity Chapel in Berkeley, starting at 8:00 p.m. Tickets are $20 general admission, $15 for seniors, disabled, and students. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. The chapel is located at 2320 Dana Street in Berkeley and is wheelchair accessible. To reserve a ticket call 510-549-3864.
