Welcome, friends and neighbors - we look forward so much to seeing you this weekend at the Maybeck Studio!
I'm sorry to report that Se Piace's viola da gamba player, Elisabeth Reed, will be unable to perform on Sunday. However Anthony Martin and Katherine Heater still have a tremendous program for us:
Bach: Trio for Harpsichord & Violin in C minor, BWV 1017
Largo • Allegro • Adagio • Allegro
Bach: Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in Eb major for Lute or Harpsichord, BWV 998
-intermission-
Biber: Passacaglia for Violin Solo
Bach: Trio for Harpsichord & Violin in E major, BWV 1016
Adagio • Allegro • Adagio, ma non tanto • Allegro
See you on Sunday!
-Jack & Ann
Maybeck Studio for the Performing Arts
Se Piace: Bach Sonatas at the Maybeck
Sunday, January 19, 2014, 3:00pm
This performance is fully reserved. Thank you for your interest!
Oft played, oft recorded, oft copied and edited and printed,
the 3 Sonatas for Gamba and 6 for Violin by Bach are going to get yet another look
starting next month in Berkeley. Katherine Heater, Elisabeth Reed, and Anthony
Martin, performing together as Se Piace,
are presenting the cycle in a series of three concerts to take place in small
venues ideally suited for hearing this intimate and intricate chamber music. The
first concert, featuring the Sonatas in B minor and A major for violin on
either side of the D major for gamba, will take place at Studio Haba na Haba in
Berkeley on Sunday, the 10th of November at 3pm. Details for all
three concerts will be found below.
A quarter century after Forkel obtained his “very tattered”
copy from Bach’s son, he wrote in his biography of Sebastian that the violin
sonatas “composed at Cöthen are among Bach's masterpieces in this form and display
fugal and canonic writing which is both natural and full of character. The violin
part needs a master to play it, for Bach knew the capabilities of the
instrument and spared it as little as the keyboard.”
Of the surviving copies (there is no autograph) the
anonymous manuscript in the Royal Danish Library shows most beautifully why
Carl Phillip called them Keyboard Trios. As we all know “trio” is a description
of the number of voices in a texture, not a prescription for the number of
players required to realize those voices. Among the possibilities that Bach
made use of are one instrument (for instance, the organ trios), two instruments
(the various sonatas for obbligato keyboard and melody instrument), three
instruments (“trio” sonatas with just keyboard continuo), or even four
instruments—trios with the bass line doubled, or with the extemporized improvisations
described by Forkel:
In musical parties where quartets or fuller
pieces of instrumental music were performed and he was not otherwise employed,
he took pleasure in playing the viola. With this instrument, he was, as it
were, in the middle of the harmony, whence he could best hear and enjoy it, on
both sides. When an opportunity offered, in such parties, he sometimes also
accompanied a trio or other pieces on harpsichord. If he was in a cheerful mood
and knew that the composer of the piece, if he happened to be present, would
not take it amiss, he used, as we have said above, to make extempore, either
out the figured bass a new trio, or of three singles parts, a quartet.
If we grant that a manuscript like the Copenhagen copy
pictured above, or the copy in Berlin by Johann Christoff Altnikol (Bach’s
son-in-law), may have been used for performance, and we assume that it sat on
the music desk of the harpsichord, all sorts of possibilities suggest
themselves to those with keen vision and imagination. Since public performances
of such sonatas in Bach’s lifetime would most often happen at a party as
described by Forkel, or perhaps during a collegial gathering at Zimmerman’s Café,
many constraints that we take for granted nowadays would not apply. A violinist
could read the top line, or even the second line. A gambist sitting next to the
keyboard player could play the bass line, or if ambitious play one of the top
lines as well. The Gamba Sonatas similarly are trios (the G major exists also
as a sonata for two flutes and continuo) and so the second line could easily be
played by a violinist who is “not otherwise employed.”
The surviving manuscript copies and other performance
materials suggest still other alternatives, particularly in the last Violin Sonata.
This sonata went through numerous transformations as Bach revised it again and
again. 9 movements in all are known to have inhabited it at one time or
another. Since they are by Bach, they are all worth hearing, and so at the
final concert in the series next May they will be integrated into a meta-work
in G major also incorporating the G major Gamba Sonata—and intermission!
Violin Sonatas 1 & 2, Gamba Sonata in D
major
Studio
Haba na Haba, 1936 Thousand Oaks Bl. between Arlington & San Fernando, in
Albany
Admission $15, refreshments provided
limited seating, for directions & details
email gentookb@icloud.com
or leave phone requests at (510) 527--2210
Sunday 1/19/14, 3pm
Se Piace
Bach Sonata Cycle II:
Violin Sonatas 3 & 4, Gamba Sonata in G
minor
Maybeck
Studio for the Performing Arts,
1537 Euclid Ave. in Berkeley
Admission $15, limited seating, for directions
and details go to maybeckstudio.org
Saturday 5/31/14, 8pm
Se Piace
Bach Sonata Cycle III:
Violin Sonatas 5 & 6, Gamba Sonata in G
major
Trinity
Chamber Concerts, 2320 Dana St. at Durant in Berkeley
$15 General/$10 Senior/ Disabled/ Student,
details at trinitychamberconcerts.com