Violinist Monica Huggett and harpsichordist Alexander Weimann played Bach on Seattle’s Early Music Guild program Saturday night, but it isn’t often we hear Bach played with the perfection these two gave him.
Three sonatas for violin and harpsichord: in B Minor, BWV 1013, C Minor BWV 1017 and E Major, BWV 1016, plus the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue for solo harpsichord, BWV 903, and the solo violin sonata in G Minor, BWV 1001, constituted the program, a lot of it familiar to many in the large audience.
These two musicians have found immediate connection in their approach to Bach. Very much on the same page, they played as two halves of a whole, and since both are consummate musicians bringing years of experience and knowledge of early music performance to their work, the result was superlative.
Huggett played a late-17th-century Dutch instrument, possibly by Hoffman of Amsterdam. Often the lowest string on a violin doesn’t sing quite as well as the upper ones but in Huggett’s hands, this violin gave forth a marvelously rich tone in that range. In the solo violin sonata, it was a joy to hear the remarkable smoothness of her touch whether playing loud, soft, fast, slow or on more than one string at a time, as well as her impeccable intonation, her discriminating use of a little vibrato and the quality of her sound.
This of course in addition to her understanding and interpretation of Bach’s ideas. The performance of this sonata was only marred by some unfortunately unstifled audience coughing that went on.
Weimann’s equally impressive playing and interpretation of the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, highlighted the extraordinary harmonic ideas Bach incorporated in this distinctive work, surely way out for his time. The evenness of Weimann’s runs which rippled all up and down the instrument, the shaping and exquisite endings to phrases added to the pleasure.
In the three violin and harpsichord sonatas, the two were in perfect synchrony of tempos, of phrasing, of expression. Sometimes those tempos were amazingly fast, but both of them were in total control.
The appreciative audience brought them back for an encore, the third movement of another sonata.
Next up at EMG is Hespèrion XXI, with viol virtuoso Jordi Savall, performing English, Irish, Scottish, and American music, on Sunday, February 28, 2016.
