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About the Music.

At a Glance

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.

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.

The Program

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

(1685–1750)

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.

Bach wrote the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue sometime before his final move to Leipzig in 1723. The musicologist Christoph Wolff dates this perennially popular masterpiece to the end of his tenure in Weimar and hypothesizes that Bach premiered it in Dresden in 1717, on a recital celebrating his default “victory” over the absent Louis Marchand. If so, BWV 903 may have been one of the pieces Johann Mattheson had in mind that year when he referred to Bach for the first time in print as “the famous organist of Weimar” whose works “are certainly such as must make one esteem the man highly.” On the other hand, another Bach expert, Martin Geck, dates the D-Minor Fantasia and Fugue as late as 1720 and speculates that its dolorous chromaticism was an expression of the composer’s grief over the death of his first wife, Maria Barbara.

A Deeper Listen

Whatever “meaning” the notes may convey, the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue definitely exemplifies the improvisatory prowess that Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, associated with his “unpremeditated fantasies.” The music modulates freely, unpredictably, and often daringly, illustrating Forkel’s observation that Bach “linked the remotest keys together as easily and naturally as the nearest; it was almost as if he were modulating in the inner circle of a single key.” The work’s opening section wends from one tonal center and scalar pattern to another by way of a dazzling variety of figurations and passagework. The Fantasia abounds in unexpected twists and turns; at times it sounds as if Bach himself is not quite sure where his fancy is leading him. The theme of the companion Fugue is a rising chromatic melody that returns throughout the piece, ingeniously embedded at different levels in the contrapuntal fabric and combined with music of contrasting character.

JASON ECKHARDT

(b. 1971)

Echoes’ White Veil About the Composer

As a guitarist playing in a heavy-metal band in the 1980s, Jason Eckhardt says he spent most of his teenage years “trying to be a rock star.” The pursuit of that elusive dream eventually took him to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he discovered the spare, radically compressed music of the early 20th-century modernist Anton Webern. By his own account, it was Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet — with its haunting quietude, pointillistic textures, and kaleidoscopic colors — that inspired him to become a composer. Yet that unexpected epiphany didn’t diminish Eckhardt’s youthful enthusiasm for rock music and free jazz. Instead, he set out to combine elements of all three styles in a hybrid language that marks what he considers his “core musical identity.”

About the Work

Composed in 1996, Echoes’ White Veil exemplifies this stylistic synthesis in its engaging blend of high-powered virtuosity, extended instrumental techniques, innovative sonorities, and improvisatory-sounding gestures. In reality, the score is meticulously notated, leaving nothing to chance