Oct. 28, St. Luke Lutheran Church
Like father, like son?
That was the implied question in the final program of this fall’s Alexander Paley Music Festival, as the pianist played works by Johann Sebastian Bach and his most gifted son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.
J.S. Bach’s compositions represent the apogee of baroque musical style. C.P.E. Bach’s, while rooted in the high baroque, broke free from its formal and expressive constraints.
J.S. was devout and spent most of his maturity as a church musician in Leipzig, writing religious works for voices. C.P.E. was primarily a secular composer, working in the Berlin court of Frederick the Great and then succeeding Georg Philipp Telemann (his godfather) as Kapellmeister of the city of Hamburg; most of his music is instrumental, a lot of it in the classical forms, such as the keyboard sonata and symphony, that were evolving into their modern forms during his lifetime.
J.S. was not without humor, but wit is subliminal in most of his music. C.P.E.’s works, especially those for solo keyboard, are full of cockeyed, startling bursts of humor.
Those differences came through in Paley’s selections of music by the two Bachs – the father’s partitas No. 3 in A minor, BWV 827, and No. 1 in B flat major, BWV 825, and Fantasia in A minor, BWV 922; the son’s rondos in A minor, H. 262, and C minor, H. 284, and an encore of one of his speedy little solfeggio exercises; but the program also reflected the son’s inheritance from his father.
Paley played his piano of choice, a Blüthner from Leipzig, a very bright-sounding instrument sounding even brighter in the acoustic of the sanctuary of St. Luke Lutheran Church. That resulted in some tonal congestion in faster, more note-heavy and highly ornamented passages of father Bach’s partitas, but also brought extra impact to the dynamism and expressive twists of C.P.E.’s rondos.
Affectus, the stylized emotiveness of baroque and early classical music, is a prominent presence in these pieces, especially in the slow dances and arias of J.S. Bach’s partitas. Here, Paley played as expressively as he would in Chopin – much as he did in keyboard suites of Jean-Philippe Rameau in a 2014 festival program. The pianist’s often whipsaw energy, meanwhile, found fertile outlets in the C.P.E. Bach rondos.
On the like-father-like-son question, Paley made J.S.’s Fantasia in A minor sound like a pre-echo of C.P.E.’s Rondo in A minor. Otherwise, the composers’ differences outweighed their kinship in these performances.
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