Cover image: Tekla Cunningham, Emily Acri, and Romaric Pokorny perform music by W. F. E. Bach at BACHtoberfest at Naked City Brewery (Photo: Henry Lebedinsky)
Henry Lebedinsky, the moving force behind the Pacific MusicWorks Underground series, has started of the season off strongly with both the Sanctuary in the City free downtown lunchtime concerts once a month, now in their second year, and the evening Underground concerts which take place in multiple venues like bars, coffee houses and event rooms, five or six different venues around the city and in Bellevue over a period of several days.
Next up in the Underground series is a program titled Avant (Baroque) Garde, various venues November 9 to 13, showing off the music of the then-adventurous composers pushing the envelope of the usual in those days. The next Sanctuary program comes the day after the election, November 7 at 12:10 p.m., and Lebedinsky (who accompanied Dargan on the piano) has chosen music composed around elections of the late 18th century. Yes, they had hard-fought elections with high emotions back then, too!
These concerts reach people who might not come to a mainstream concert in a concert hall and, as Lebedinsky pointed out at the latest Underground concert featuring music of the Bach family, the group has gone back to Bach family beginnings. He mentioned, for instance, that Johann Sebastian Bach’s well-known Brandenburg concertos were only one of the compositions Bach and his musical friends played in Zimmerman’s coffee house in Leipzig, where other patrons were drinking coffee, eating, talking, maybe listening with half an ear. Bach even wrote an extremely amusing coffee house cantata.
James Dargan sings an unaccompanied Spiritual to a rapt audience at Christ Our Hope at the Josephinum (Photo: Henry Lebedinsky)
There’s no eating lunch, however, in the beautiful, acoustically excellent Christ Our Hope Church in the Josephinum on Second Avenue downtown, where the 40-minute Sanctuary concerts are performed the first Wednesday of each month. The latest featured a superb baritone from New York, James Dargan, who sang spirituals, art songs by Schubert and Verdi, even a Persian love song by Anton Rubinstein.
His is a beautiful voice which he used with nuanced musicianship and fine technique to give every song its due in meaning and emotion. He chose the spirituals as ones which had been sung by great black singers during the last century: Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Nina Simone, Billie Holliday, and Robert McFerrin, Sr. It was a shame however, that the translations of those songs in other languages were not given in the program.
I caught last weekend’s “BACHtoberfest” Underground concert at the Royal Room in Columbia City. Lebedinsky, clad in jeans and holding a glass in his hand is as good as a carnival barker at drawing people in as he told anecdotes about the Bach family and introduced each piece. Six musicians–himself on harpsichord, two violins viola, cello and flute, all baroque instruments—played Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, which sounded much more immediate in that surroundings than in a concert hall with a full orchestra. Every detail of the music in each person’s performance was easily audible. The instruments were miked, which wasn’t really necessary there, but in some of the venues they use it may be.
Audience members mug for the camera at BACHtoberfest at Naked City Brewery (Photo: Henry Lebedinsky)
Other Bach family works followed, and the audience being waited on as they ate, drank, sometimes talked and mostly listened, seemed attentive. It was certainly appreciative of both the long harpsichord solo in the first movement and of flutist Joshua Romatowski’s flute in both that work and its prominent place in an Overture by Bach’s cousin Johann Bernhard Bach.
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