Artistic Director of Bach Akademie Australia, Madeleine Easton, presents Bach’s Obbligato Sonatas (BWV 1014 -1016, 1018-1019) as part of a continued exposition of J.S. Bach the man, through personal experiences of his musical world.
Despite Bach’s prolific output and modern fame, we know little about Bach, or how he located himself within a broader cultural and intellectual environment. Researchers and writers can only back up the few documented sources with supposition and deduction. We certainly know he worked as a master craftsman, at various provincial posts across early Enlightenment Germany, producing works on a nearly industrial scale.
Few geniuses manifest in a vacuum, and we can only imagine how Bach’s world reveals itself within his music. Easton takes Bach’s manuscripts as the unadulterated path into the heart and mind of the man. She does so with virtuosity, appreciation and scholarship, honed through extended associations with Sir John Eliot Gardiner – the world's foremost Bach exponent.
Above: View to East Portico, St James Church, 1836. Right, contemporary night view of East Portico
Easton leads this series of six sonatas from the violin, supported by esteemed early-music specialists Neal Peres Da Costa on harpsichord and Anton Baba on viola da gamba (a Baroque instrument that links the Renaissance lute to the modern cello). Researchers believe that Bach wrote this purely instrumental series while employed at a Calvinist court, a place with little taste for the ornamentations of his well-known orchestral/choral pieces, he produced for his Lutheran patrons.
Bach sets up numerous musical inter-weavings and inter-relationships within the creative constraints of three delicate, expressive instruments. These “secular” pieces may seem more restrained and reflective than the more declarative church pieces. However, they do vary in pace between movements, alternating from contemplation to crescendo. “Each sonata displays a different personality, colour and mood with its unique harmonic characteristics...” says Easton. She adds that they take us “...on a journey through every conceivable mood and emotion from extreme joy to contemplative introspection.”
These works show Bach’s musical mind at work. A biographer, Christoph Wolff, compares Bach’s achievements with those of Newton. Both look through their own lens to expresses their own versions of the perfection of nature. Easton also parallels Newton’s achievements in astronomy with Bach. He “reinvented, discovered and perfected new and wondrous ways of making music... Looking in the works,” Easton says, “does indeed feel like observing the workings of a great mind”.
During this series, the Akademie performs at St James church, the oldest extant church in Sydney. It’s an extraordinary setting. For 27 years, until 1993, it’s engraved image adorned the $10 note. Architectural historian Dan Cruickshank featured the church in his BBC series, Around the World in 80 Treasures (2008). He believed it successfully demonstrates the rapid advance of the infant colony from convict dumping ground in 1788 to a community with a sense and certainty for its future. The church was designed by Francis Greenway in the late Georgian style – even as the style was giving way in Britain to various stylistic revivals. It forms part of a larger precinct that includes two other Greenway buildings—the World Heritage Convict Barracks and the Old Supreme Court. With their cohesion, simplicity, relatedness and rationality, the buildings invoke late Enlightenment thinking and expression. In a country with such a short, settled history, the church and its precinct provide one of the few physical touchstones that directly connects Australians to Enlightenment ways of being. While the setting may be a hundred years after Bach, it provides an additional path to imagining the heart and mind of Bach, being revealed through the Bach Akademie of Australia.