Gil Shaham’s Multimedia Tour

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Gil Shaham in Six Solos for Violin

Gil Shaham often tells his children to take risks, try new things and not be afraid of making mistakes. But the renowned violinist realized a few years ago that he had not done a very good job of following his own advice, so he decided to break out of his comfort zone and develop an innovative twenty-first-century way to present Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001-1006).

“I think of this as a little bit of maybe practicing what I preach,” he said.

Shaham teamed with New York video artist David Michalek, who has created a group of short films to be projected on a screen behind the violinist as he performs the six works. The resulting multimedia collaboration will make its debut during a national tour timed to coincide with the 10 March 2015 release of Shaham’s recording of the complete Bach set on his Canary Classics label. The tour began 1 March 2015 in Chicago as part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Symphony Center Presents series, continues in late March in California, and concludes 23 April 2015 with a performance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“I hope people come to see it with an open mind,” Shaham said. “Some of the images will surprise people. Some might shock people. But I found them to be mesmerizing and beautiful and very, very musical.”

Michalek has gained international attention for his multifaceted body of work, which includes large-scale outdoor installations, in which he projects super slow-motion films on giant screens. These projects have been shown in such high-visibility sites as Lincoln Center, Trafalgar Square, and Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. Among the best-known such works is Slow Dancing, which consists of forty-three video portraits of dancers and choreographers from around the world. Each subject was filmed using a high-speed, high-definition camera that records one thousand frames per second compared to the standard thirty frames. Because the resulting videos last ten minutes but show only five seconds of action, the movement is barely perceptible.

The artist has continued his extreme slow-motion techniques for this project, finding thematic links to Bach’s works without trying to specifically interpret them. The challenge was to create images for music never intended for such purpose and to make sure the two mediums complemented each other. Michalek asked himself such questions as: “What does it mean to couple this kind of pure music with an image? What can an image do? What can it do advantageously? What can it do problematically?”

Some experts believe the three pairs of sonatas and partitas relate to the New Testament stories of Christ’s Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection. Rather than attempting to directly depict the first of those, for example, Michalek chose to suggest new life by filming a budding six-year-old violinist playing her instrument, zeroing in on her face and tiny fingers. “That’s all it is,” he said. “That’s the image. So, while we hear Gil onstage, playing the heights of violin music, we see a little being on screen holding the same instrument.” For another section, he created a kind of filmed still life, with a crystal ball, skull, and just the movement of sand slowing dropping through an hourglass.

Like Bach’s six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12), the composer’s 1720 works for solo violin are considered among the most profound and expressive statements ever written for the instrument. Out of respect, Shaham postponed taking them on until about ten years ago, when he finally began performing them in public. “And then I learned what so many other musicians have said before – that there is really no greater joy than playing Bach,” he said. “When I go to my practice room, I’ll start practicing, and the time will just pass. Suddenly, it’s two hours later.”

As part of his activities while serving as the 2013-14 artist-in-residence with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, he performed Bach’s solo violin works as part of three chamber-music programs. Because the ensemble is one of two orchestras that operate under the auspices of the Bayerischer Rundfunk, Shaham decided to take advantage of its easily accessible recording studios and engineers to record the set last summer. “It seemed like a good moment to do it,” he said.

The album will be the fourteenth release by Canary Classics, the label Shaham founded in 2003 as a way to have the freedom to record what he wanted without the commercial pressures associated with larger labels. It has since issued recordings featuring the violinist’s sister, pianist Orli Shaham, and his wife, violinist Adele Anthony. “It’s sort of a small family business,” the violinist said. The label was begun with a simple business plan: use the proceeds from the last recording used to pay for the next. “I feel very lucky that so far we’ve been able to do that.”

A big surprise for the violinist’s longtime fans is that he has brought a lighter-sounding, period-performance approach to his playing of the Bach solo Sonatas and Partitas. “I feel like now is probably the most rewarding time ever to be studying Bach, to be playing Bach, to be listening to Bach, because we have had so much research about it, and so, for example, I love the recordings of (Dutch conductor) Ton Koopman (and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra) of the Orchestral Suites (BWV 1066-8). So, I began experimenting. I guess it’s part of my mid-life crisis.”

To play these works, he reconfigures his 1699 Stradivarius with a baroque-style bridge made by New York luthier Adam Crane and gut instead of the usual steel strings, and he employs a Baroque-style bow commissioned from New York bow maker Markus Laine. At the same time, Shaham has incorporated such period-performance practices as less vibrato and faster tempos. “Some people have been surprised at my tempi, and I understand that. I certainly am playing much of this music faster than I used to, and I’m convinced for now that I’m happier with it.”

As he delved into Bach’s solo Sonatas and Partitas, Shaham said the spirit of experimentation in the music rubbed off on him and he began thinking about possible new ways to present this music. He realized today’s audiences do not understand many of the cultural references that would have come naturally for Bach’s contemporaries, such as what a bourrée is and how the music for it sounds.

So he wanted to provide new entry points into these works for twenty-first-century audiences. That’s when he thought of Michalek’s installation, Slow Dancing, which he saw in the Lincoln Center Plaza in 2007 and realized might be just the vehicle he was looking for. “I thought the way he shot his films was so beautiful, and especially the way he used time, the play with light and time, and I thought that could easily lend itself to music.”

The two first met at Café Luxembourg, near Lincoln Center, and quickly hit it off. It helped that Michalek was a fan of Bach and owned several recordings of the solo violin works. They later got together for further discussion at Michalek’s apartment, with the two of them sitting on the floor of the artist’s little library – Shaham breaking down the structure of the sonatas and partitas and playing examples on his violin, and Michalek showing excerpts from his other works. Soon their collaboration was firmly under way.

As an outgrowth of projects like Slow Dancing, Michalek does commissioned family portraits using a similar slow-motion technology. One day, he visited a client’s house, where one of his filmed diptychs of boys ages six and eight happened to be running at the same time that a recording of cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing a Bach solo suite was playing. To the artist, it appeared that the boys were having a response to the music he was hearing, and watching them and listening at the same time enhanced his appreciation of the music.

“It didn’t seem to damage to music,” he said. “It didn’t seem to fight with it. It was just a very simple mechanism that allowed me to get into a sort of state of active listening that I could sustain. Not that I can’t sustain it without the image. But it helped me do it differently, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is a way in.’”

Michalek set about creating short slow-motion videos to accompany each section of the six Bach works. The high-definition videos will be projected behind Shaham on screens that will vary in size depending on the venues where he performs. Michalek’s technical director will travel with the violinist and oversee the presentation of the visual imagery, which has to be manually queued to the duration of the violinist’s playing.

In all, the artist shot more than two hundred fifty takes, and he spent recent weeks deciding on which ones to include in the work. Shaham finally had a chance to see the final product earlier this week, and he called it stunning. “I feel very honored to be part of David’s vision in this project,” he said. “I think it’s a testament to Bach that the power of his music transcends centuries and cultures and mediums and inspires people.”

Kyle MacMillan – Classical Voice North America

Frank Music Company to Close

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New York’s Frank Music Company

Frank Music Company has supplied classical sheet music to generations of instrumentalists, singers and composers. On Friday, 6 March 2015, the retail store will close its doors for good, succumbing to dwindling sales.

Frank Music has been struggling for years, as music became readily available online, said Heidi Rogers, the shop’s owner. “We went from seeing fifteen to twenty people per day to seeing two or three,” Ms. Rogers said on Monday. “I went from feeling like I was at the center of the world to feeling invisible.” The store, on West 54th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, opened in 1937 and provided the city’s musicians scores from the standard – Bach, Beethoven – to the arcane. Ms. Rogers bought it in 1978.

Frank Music is the last store in the city dedicated to selling classical sheet music, Ms. Rogers said, although other places such as the Juilliard School’s bookstore at Lincoln Center have it on their shelves.

Frank Music’s stock, which Ms. Rogers counts as hundreds of thousands of scores, was purchased by an anonymous donor as a gift for the Colburn School, a music conservatory in Los Angeles. The school and Ms. Rogers declined to comment on financial details. Colburn School’s president and chief executive, Sel Kardan, called Frank Music’s scores “an invaluable resource for our students and faculty for years to come.”

To the sixty-three-year-old Ms. Rogers, nothing is more important than the arts. “The idea that classical music is irrelevant is ridiculous,” she said, bemoaning the comparative salaries of tubists and stockbrokers. “People should be paid in terms of what they contribute to people’s well being.” The store’s celebrity clients over the years have included pianists Emanuel Ax and Jeremy Denk, violinist Pamela Frank and cellist David Finckel. One of Ms. Rogers’s favorite memories is a telephone call from the violinist Itzhak Perlman, asking for Kreisler scores.

The composer Bruce Adolphe, who is resident lecturer at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, described the store as a musical meeting ground. “Frank’s Music was not just a store but a crucible,” he said, “a nexus where musicians from Suzuki beginners and their parents, to Joshua Bell, or the Brentano’s Mark Steinberg, would meet by chance.” Its closing is perhaps the latest example of classical music’s changing brick-and-mortar businesses.

Joseph Patelson Music House, another longtime sheet-music establishment, closed in 2009, and Dowling Music shut its doors in 2013. Last year, J&R Music and Computer World, the last store in New York with a sizable classical CD section, stopped carrying classical albums.

Musicians have plenty of online opportunities to buy sheet music, whether from Amazon.com, publishers or specialty websites such as Sheet Music Plus. The website IMSLP, a digital library of public-domain music, allows users to download scores for free. Some musicians with iPads have dispensed with pesky paper scores altogether.

For now, Ms. Rogers plans to pack up the rest of the store’s contents and then spend some time on her farm in the Catskills, where she has tenant farmers and fifty chickens. “Everyone says, ‘Aren’t you going to have a party?’ ” she said. “I feel like having a funeral.”

Corinne Ramey – The Wall Street Journal

The Twyla Tharp Ballet We Nearly Lost

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Scene from Bach Partita

A new ballet requires weeks of intensive rehearsal in order to reach the stage, and if it’s not properly taken care of, it can become extremely difficult to revive. In fact, if it isn’t performed for a substantial period of time, and if the dancers on whom it was made start to lose their muscle memory of the choreography, then the piece can slip away altogether.

Last fall, American Ballet Theatre rescued an important piece from that oblivion. Twyla Tharp’s rigorously beautiful Bach Partita had been made for the company in 1983, performed no more than ten times through 1985, and then vanished.

Thanks to the dedication of Susan Jones, a longtime and indispensable ballet mistress with the company – who was in the studio as Tharp’s assistant as the ballet was created thirty years earlier – Bach Partita came back to the stage. It was danced with astonishing commitment and panache by a new generation of dancers.

New Yorkers now have another chance to see this nearly-lost sensation. After playing Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater last year, it has returned to the space this month as part of ABT’s fall season in New York.

Back in 1981, the versatile and ever-surprising Tharp was on quite a roll with her own company. The Catherine Wheel, set to an original David Byrne score, played Broadway that year, and in 1982 she had a huge success with the sensuously elegant Nine Sinatra Songs. For her return to ABT (where she’d created the exuberant and witty Push Comes to Shove, a huge hit in 1976), Tharp chose a thirty-minute Bach score and choreographed fiercely complex, purely classical choreography for a cast of thirty-six.

New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff’s delivered an enthusiastic review: “Miss Tharp thinks amazingly big here in every sense of the word,” she wrote. “For the first time, she has attempted a true neoclassical ballet whose movement is rooted in ballet’s academic code rather than her own modern-dance idiom with incorporation of ballet steps.” She later described the piece as “a treasure house of dance invention for those fascinated by formal intricacy and experiments with movement.”

Recalling Bach Partita, Jones says, “I think it was really Bach that drove her. She has her point of view about the music and how it should be played, how it’s meant to be. She was really challenging the dancers. I think that the hardest thing for them – aside from absorbing Twyla’s style and getting it into their bodies – was the speed she required. It was choreographed to a Heifetz recording that is just faster than the speed of light!” [The ballet is always performed with a live violinist.]

The original cast included three principal couples, seven soloist couples, and an ensemble of sixteen women. “Twyla was developing her relationship with ABT and was discovering more things about the classical vocabulary,” recalls Robert La Fosse, who was the youngest of the six principals. “She was pushing the balletic partnering to new limits and challenging us with movements that changed directions constantly.”

Jones, who rehearses many Tharp dances, often staging them for various companies, is passionate about this one. “I feel it’s one of her best pieces. The fact that it’s Bach, and that it’s all of these dancers dancing their hearts out to this one violinist who’s making this incredible sound – I think it’s exhilarating. I didn’t think this ballet would ever go away.”

The challenge of finding a violinist who could play the score superbly at the tempi Tharp required was one reason the ballet slipped out of repertory. Programming demands – ABT devotes most of its performances to full-evening, narrative ballets – and other company considerations also played a role.

But Jones always kept it in mind. She recalls a 1996 dinner with Tharp when they discussed what it would take to get Bach Partita back on stage. Little did Jones realize, when about fifteen years later that became an actual possibility, how complicated the process would be.

No visual documentation of decent quality was available to help jog Jones’ memory. There was a black-and-white performance videotape, but it was overexposed. “At center stage, there was detail that was missing from the steps that I knew was there,” she says. “It was a process of seeing the root step and dusting off the cobwebs.” A studio rehearsal videotape was filmed a week before the premiere, but afterward Tharp made some pivotal changes in the distribution of the roles.

Over the years, Jones would urge Kevin McKenzie, ABT’s artistic director, to commit to a revival of the ballet. Considerable rehearsal time would be required, however, and casting the many demanding roles would be a challenge.

On her own, Jones began preparing. “Around 2011, I thought I would just start looking at these tapes. In whatever free time I had, I started notating and trying to reconstruct the ballet. And I did that for two years.”

Finally, last year, ABT had a longer-than-usual rehearsal period, substantial enough for Jones to delve into re-staging the work for the dancers of today. Tharp herself was present at rehearsals regularly for four of the six weeks. “She was really involved in the coaching. She knew that it needed that,” Jones says.

La Fosse was in the audience last November at the Koch to witness the rebirth of Bach Partita. “The new cast at ABT is superb,” he says. “They have a better grasp at the technical aspects of her style. It was like seeing a whole new ballet unfold in front of my eyes. So many moments stay in my memory. I can’t wait to see it again.”

For Jones, seeing the ballet come to life again was “incredible, really phenomenal.” But now that it’s back in repertory, her focus is on keeping it in top shape. “Now that they’ve gotten it in their blood, now it’s my job to make sure that the edge is there, and that they don’t let it become generic movement,” she says. “It has to reflect Twyla’s style. It’s part of the life of any ballet. You have to keep it fresh and keep the spontaneity there.”

Susan Reiter – TDF Stages

A Second, Rawer, Bout of Passion

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Camilla Tilling and Mark Padmore

Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b) is contemplative, a study in suffering and transcendence. His St. John Passion (BWV 245) is tighter and more angular, a battlefield of action and reaction.

Matthew weeps and wonders while John, which the Berlin Philharmonic and its conductor, Simon Rattle, performed [last week] in a powerful new staging by Peter Sellars at the Philharmonie [in Berlin], presses forward. Matthew is a mass, John an opera.

But not quite. While our sense of Bach has deepened as scholars have learned more about the key role opera played in the world he inhabited, he chose never to write in the genre. It seems there was something he resisted about a form whose audience consumed art passively.

He created works, the Passions most of all, whose viewers are also, in a sense, participants, constantly questioning themselves and their perspective. For instance, the chorus enacting a mob of persecutors suddenly transforms into a huddled band of mourners.

In his 2010 staging of the St. Matthew Passion, Mr. Sellars showed a keen understanding of the status of these works as rituals rather than operas. It was a spare, haunting production that consisted physically of little more than dark clothes, simple gestures and some white blocks. The emphasis was on intense emotion and human connection, with close interaction between the instrumentalists and singers.

With the rich yet raw playing of the Philharmonic under Mr. Rattle, a moving cast of soloists and the incisive Berlin Radio Choir, the Matthew Passion was instantly a classic, a model of the convergence of music and spectacle that has become increasingly important in drawing people to orchestras. Released on DVD by the ensemble, the production will travel to New York in October for two performances at the Park Avenue Armory to open Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, the climax of a visit by the Philharmonic that also includes four concerts at Carnegie Hall.

The follow-up, Mr. Sellars’s St. John Passion, has been eagerly anticipated. Granted a luxurious amount of rehearsal and a nearly intact cast from the Matthew performances – only the great bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff is missing, and missed, having announced his retirement in 2012 – the simmering performance lives up to the high expectations.

Mr. Sellars’s touching stylization was better suited to the grief-stricken Matthew than the more stoic John, and the physical relationship he created between the orchestra and the other performers was more meaningful in that earlier production. But in John, he still created potent effects, pushing his soloists toward focused melancholy. He made the Berlin Radio Choir sprawl on the stage, crawl across it as a mass and, at one point, race to the corners of the Philharmonie to create a chilling sense of sonic immersion.

Visually there is even less to Mr. Sellars’s St. John Passion than his Matthew. The choral and instrumental forces of John are smaller, so the teeming feeling of the previous production is poignantly depleted. In lieu of the white blocks, there is just a hanging spotlight hovering a few feet above the center of the stage and, sometimes, a chair. The lighting changes starkly with each abrupt shift of mood.

Like the St. Matthew Passion, John tells the story of the end of Jesus’s life by an alternation of three elements: a dramatization in recitative of the biblical text, hymn-like chorales and reflective arias. But Mr. Sellars focuses intently in this John on the first of these, making truly central the three singers who voice Jesus, Peter/Pilate and, especially, the narrating Evangelist.

The Philharmonic was lucky to have once more the tenor Mark Padmore, one of the great Evangelists of our time, and superb here. A wandering witness to terrible events he helplessly recalls, he is a cousin of the shellshocked Captain Vere he portrayed in Britten’s Billy Budd at the Brooklyn Academy of Music a few weeks ago.

It seems reductive to pick out specific moments, like the sensitivity with which he described Peter warming himself, the majestic way he unfurled the word “weinete” (“wept”) or his soaring line after Jesus declares Pilate powerless. From his first word – “Jesus,” a microcosm of caring – Mr. Padmore’s performance was an integrated, unforgettable vocal and dramatic whole.

The baritone Roderick Williams’s voice rang out commandingly beneath a blindfold as Jesus, but it was a questionable choice to have him collapse at the chorus’s cries of “kreuzige” (“crucify”). The Jesus of the St. John Passion is not the suffering martyr of Matthew but calm and collected, a winner. We may identify less today with his confident reserve, but the contrast of that coolness with the others’ hysteria and pain gives the work meaning.

Contemporary audiences may feel more of a connection to the tormented Pilate, whom the thoughtful baritone Christian Gerhaher and Mr. Sellars have rendered as a well-meaning, weak-willed bourgeois functionary. Dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt open at the neck, he may be a lawyer or banker whose power derives from a structure that prevents him from doing good. His question to Jesus – “was ist Wahrheit?” (“what is truth?”) – was here a stunned expression of existential emptiness.

The soloists in the arias were less devastating. Magdalena Kožená’s soft-grained mezzo-soprano suited the earth-mother role she seemed to embody, with her thickly woven red gown and very obvious pregnancy. The soprano Camilla Tilling sounded committed, light and creamy, only turning tense at the very top of the voice. The only disappointment was the tenor Topi Lehtipuu, colorless and strained in his important arias.

Mr. Rattle conducted a performance that was lush yet energetic from the first downbeat, with warm balance between the strings and the winds. The sharp edge of the violins faced the ominous buzz of the bassoon as the chorus denied it had the ability to put Jesus to death, and the flute soloists were velvety in the aria Ich folge dir. The continuo players, who accompanied the recitatives, were dazzlingly unified with the singers in moments like Jesus’s declaration that his kingdom does not belong to this world.

The chorus, led by Simon Halsey, was particularly affecting in slower music, when the singers came together in great waves. Other passages could have been less polite: the cries of “kreuzige” even more terrifying and the horrifyingly jovial account of rolling dice for the distribution of Jesus’s tunic more grotesque.

But the work’s final sequence – a long, somber chorus followed by a shining hymn – left me full of the feeling that John Eliot Gardiner, in his recent study Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, writes is one thing we have when the St. John Passion is over: a pained, uneasy gratitude.

Zachary Woolfe – The New York Times