This is not the first time a connection has been explored between the music of JS Bach and Arvo Pärt. It all started with the latter composer, who decades ago openly declared his kinship with the Baroque master in pieces such as his Collage sur B-A-C-H of 1964, which directly quotes several of his instrumental works, and the exceptionally witty, raspy-toned Wenn Bach Bienen gezüchtet hätte (If Bach had been a beekeeper) of 1976.
Call it a spiritual calling across the centuries. It seems to spring from the Estonian composer’s radical and very personal need to find a distillation, an essence, by deliberately breaking what at the time was modernism’s Golden Rule of always looking forwards.
Whatever it is, Richard Tognetti has been listening. Silence & Rapture appeared, on first glance, to be another of his enterprising collaborations, this time with the Sydney Dance Company (SDC). But it was not exactly this. This bold concert idea looked to be entirely of his making: a biblical kind of journey from temptation to redemption through music of Bach and Pärt, in five imaginary scenes.
Attempting to explain it all was a 50-page program book, but it was too dense to get through and was best put aside anyway. Narrative content wasn’t the point. Rather, it was all about interpretation through figurative dance. Two members of SDC, Liam Green and Emily Seymour, accompanied many of the 16 works being performed, using their own highly developed dance language for each scene.
Collaborations can be shotgun affairs, each partner doing their own thing and hoping for the best. This, however, was beautifully successful, music and dance joining in a rare unity.
Silence & Rapture is a beautifully successful union of music and dance. Photo: Daniel Boud
Having just two dancers, rather than the stage crowded with motion, was the elegant solution. Green and Seymour carried an air of mystery in a wholly self-invented choreography that seemed to come from inside the music: knotty, tensile movement of body in the “Toccata” from Pärt’s afore-mentioned Collage and Fratres, and an entwining intimate sensuosity in the final piece, which, tantalisingly, was by neither Bach nor Pärt but instead by Hindemith: his Trauermusik is a heartbreakingly moving work from the modern era also inspired by Bach.
Elsewhere, the two dancers assumed statuesque poses like figures carved from marble. For Bach’s Kanon zu acht Stimmen, BWV 1072, this was tellingly effective. It’s an extraordinary piece of just five notes that keep playing against one another in a mesmerising web of sound; as is frequently remarked, it sounds a bit like the minimalism of Philip Glass, but it reminds one even more of Pärt’s early minimalist works.
For the very final notes that Bach ever wrote, in The Art of Fugue, the music petered out just as it does in his unfinished manuscript, and now the dancers were by themselves, dancing to “silent music”. One could just hear their footfalls and slides across the stage as the lighting faded. So clever.
But we haven’t even got to what was most remarkable about Silence & Rapture. English countertenor Iestyn Davies was guest artist in many of the items, which included movements from Bach cantatas and “Erbarme Dich” from the St Matthew Passion.
Davies carries a formidable reputation, as early music followers will tell you, and there’s a reason. There’ve been many fine countertenors in recent years, but simply none finer than Davies. He is astonishing. Tone colour and diction perfectly converge, whether it is Baroque arias or songs of Pärt. With vocal chords that are particularly open and resonant, he is able to develop a sound that is both natural and well projected.
Could “Erbarme Dich” or Pärt’s pulsating “My Heart in the Highlands” have sounded better? No. It was divinely beautiful – one wanted his every breath to last forever.
But what about the powerhouse behind this whole magnificent design, Tognetti himself? He has his radar constantly out for ideas, and he’s a master at devising new ways of doing things. Others attempting a show like this might have fallen for stereotypes: Bach and Pärt as mathematically patterned, pious and austere. Not here. Tognetti’s answer was liberated and rapturous. One heard, and “saw” in a sense, both composers in a new light.
Tognetti’s own solos bore all his usual wonderful hallmarks, notably in Bach’s Sonata for Violin and Keyboard No.2: crisp gesture, expressive line, and a clean draw of bow that is better than just about any other violinist. It felt exactly right across all this divergent yet strikingly similar repertoire.
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Equally wonderful, Timo-Veikko Valve was the best and freest he’s ever played in Bach’s Third Cello Suite. He is such a good musician. Chad Kelly, on chamber organ and harpsichord, proved he is a new force in Australia, too. And as alert as ever, the ACO strings were even more energised in this concert.
With so many discoveries, this was one for the ages.
Graham Strahle reviewed Australian Chamber Orchestra’s performance of ‘Silence & Rapture’ at the Adelaide Town Hall on August 13. The concert is also being presented in Perth, the ACT and Brisbane (dates here). Their next concert is ‘Tognetti. Mendelssohn. Bach.’ .
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