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Bach’s ‘Musical Offering’ Given by Salish Sea Early Music Festival

Philippa Kiraly , , , ,

There’s a wonderfully varied selection of Bach performances in Seattle this spring. Last Friday night brought a rare performance of The Musical Offering along with a couple of sonatas and the Chromatic Fantasia, given at Christ Episcopal Church as part of the Salish Sea Early Music Festival.

Director of the series Jeffrey Cohan played baroque flute, with Ingrid Matthews, violin; and Hans-Jürgen Schnoor, harpsichord.

It’s perfectly permissible to change instrumentation in many Bach works, as he did himself (I have heard Bach performed, quite acceptably, by steel band, as well as by such luminaries as The Swingle Singers).

For the Sonata in G Major BWV 1019, originally for violin and harpsichord obbligato, Cohan took the upper line of the harpsichord and played it on the flute, with the third of five movements a harpsichord solo. For the Trio Sonata in G Major, BWV 1027 (original instrumentation harpsichord and viola da gamba) and 1039 (same sonata but now with two flutes and continuo) Salish Sea played with the three musicians: flute, violin, and continuo harpsichord, and they did the same with The Musical Offering, where the instruments are not specifically indicated though they included flute, violins, continuo, and keyboard.

It’s always a delight to hear musicians as steeped as these three in Baroque performance practice, all consummate performers in Bach’s intricate tapestries of interweaving lines, canons, and musical embroidery. (There were no program notes but both Cohan and Schnoor gave verbal ones.)

Cohan and Mathews need no introduction to Seattle audiences, both Bodky Award winners and superb musicians. Schnoor, from Lübeck, Germany, has frequently performed with Cohan, but his performance Friday often lacked enough definition. His runs were not always quite clean, his lines not always clearly delineated. The timbres of the three instruments shaded the music with contrasting but complementary colors, while the lower registers of both flute and violin were noticeably deep and warm.

Philippa Kiraly

Classical Music Philippa Kiraly comes to The SunBreak from The Gathering Note where she covered classical music for three years. She has been steeped in her field since early childhood and began writing as a critic in 1980. She has written for a variety of publications, as second critic for the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal from 1983-1991 and, since moving to Seattle that year, in the same capacity for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer until its print demise.

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