Baroque Period

Daniel Stepner Plays Solo Bach

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On Monday, we ventured into the monumental preludes and fugues of J.S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Let’s finish the week with an excerpt from Daniel Stepner’s 2013 Centaur Records release of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. Stepner offers period performances of these works, tuning to the lowered A of Bach’s time, and using three fine old instruments: a 1641 Italian Amati violin, a 1740s German Klotz, and a 1693 Stradivari. The recording was made over the course 23 years, between …

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The Well-Tempered Clavier: Bach’s Sublime Exercises

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For more than 250 years, Das wohltemperierte Clavier has trained the fingers of innumerable keyboard players, and has also trained the judgment of composers seeking to understand the complex relationship between creative freedom and formal discipline. – Davitt Moroney There’s an interesting irony in the fact that the ultimate creative freedom often grows out of rules and constraints. This is something architects, who embark on projects with a detailed program outlining the client’s needs and …

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Five Musical Fireworks

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It’s ironic that Independence Day in America isn’t complete without Tchaikovsky’s most famous ode to Russian nationalism: the bombastic 1812 Overture, which was written to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon’s invading army. As we head into the July Fourth holiday weekend, here are five more pieces that bring fireworks to mind: Handel: Music for the Royal Fireworks In 1749, England’s King George II employed Handel to write music for a large, outdoor public celebration in …

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Who Needs Trumpets?

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Last weekend, I played for a wedding which included a stirring two-trumpet fanfare. This was followed immediately by an outdoor Richmond Symphony concert which featured John Williams’ main title music for Star Wars. Both occasions reminded me of the trumpet’s deeply celebratory and heroic connotations. Listen to another classic John Williams film score, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and you’ll hear how clearly the trumpet evokes the personality of the film’s protagonist: adventurous, heroic, impetuous, and slightly …

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Staying Grounded in Henry Purcell

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What does music of seventeenth-century English composer Henry Purcell have in common with a contemporary pop song like U2’s With Or Without You? Both are built on a repeating ostinato bass line, called a ground bass. Early traces of the ground bass emerged in thirteenth-century French vocal motets and fifteenth-century European dance music. By the time Purcell used it, it was a relatively old technique. Purcell’s Fantasia, Three Parts On a Ground was written in the early 1680s. …

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Zaha Hadid’s Frozen Music

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Zaha Hadid, the visionary and sometimes controversial Iraqi-born British architect, passed away suddenly on Thursday. She was 65. Her uncompromising, sculptural designs unequivocally embraced the ethos of “architecture as art” in a way reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright. Fellow architect Rem Koolhaas called her “a planet in her own inimitable orbit.” There’s a geological quality to Hadid’s Wanjing Soho towers in Beijing, completed in 2014. They rise on the landscape like three giant pebbles. Horizontal …

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A Preview of Rachel Barton Pine’s New Solo Bach Recording

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Friday marks the official release of violinist Rachel Barton Pine’s newest recording: Testament: Complete Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin by J.S. Bach. Pine talks about the recording and her relationship with Bach’s music in this interview with Richmond Public Radio’s Mike Goldberg. She performs with a baroque bow, finding that it leads to greater ease in playing chords and captures both “sweetness and vitality“ in the music. We also hear her 1742 Guarneri. (Pine made …

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