About the Music. At a Glance
The Program
A master improviser, Bach possessed the ability to transmute his musical thoughts into sound almost at will. After listening to the Baroque master extemporize on the organ, the famous Dutch virtuoso Johann Adam Reincken declared, “I thought that this art was dead, but I see that in you it still lives.” Like many of Bach’s preludes, toccatas, and other free-form works, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue is essentially a written-down improvisation. Conrad Tao, who is both a renowned composer and a concert pianist, carries on the tradition by prefacing his performance of Bach’s masterpiece with an improvisation of his own.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1750)
Jason Eckhardt, a one-time guitarist in a heavy-metal band, combines the spare, pointillistic textures of the early 20th-century modernist Anton Webern with elements of rock music and free jazz. Echoes’ White Veil was inspired by a prose poem by W. S. Merwin; its complex, multilayered verbal imagery is echoed in Eckhardt’s densely packed and often improvisatory-sounding score. In a similar fantasy-like vein, Schumann’s Kreisleriana reflects the contrasting personalities of the Romantic composer’s fictional alter egos: the impulsive Florestan and the dreamy Eusebius. The work takes its name from Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, the half-crazed brainchild of German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, Schumann’s literary soulmate.
Caramoor
Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 903 About the Composer To Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the most famous of Johann Sebastian’s musical sons, his father was “the most prodigious organist and keyboard player that there has ever been.” By the time of his death in 1750, the elder Bach’s towering stature as a virtuoso was universally acknowledged. Yet his only formal instruction on keyboard instruments came from his older brother Johann Christoph, who served as organist in the small central German town of Ohrdruf. Young Johann Sebastian proved a quick study, and by age 18 he was established in his first professional post at Arnstadt. Thereafter his reputation grew by leaps and bounds. So, it seems, did his self-assurance. In 1717 he traveled to Dresden and challenged the renowned virtuoso Louis Marchand to a contest, which the Frenchman famously forfeited by skipping town. Thirty years later, on a visit to the court of the musicloving Frederick the Great in Potsdam, the aging composer improvised a dazzling set of fugal variations on a theme supplied by the king, which he later used as the basis of his musical offering.
