Bach Festival features contemporary dance and live baroque performances

Johann Sebastian Bach was a masterful chameleon. His vast oeuvre is replete with charts that lend themselves to – nay, openly invite – freewheeling renditions as per the performer in question’s informed personal and artistic take. Hence, it makes perfect sense to have the 10th edition of the Bach Festival run the same week as Purim, our own holiday of manifold guises, disguises, and costumes.

In Bach’s day – something which often escapes classical music fans – improvisation was part and parcel of the compositional and performance way of going about things. Bach, for example, did not always set hard and fast rules with regard to the instrumental lineup used for renditions of his works. And he was a pretty nifty musical extrapolator himself.

That accommodating mindset informs the festival agenda, which encompasses such diverse artistic, cultural, disciplinary, and philosophical goalposts as liturgical texts, jazz, Nordic and Middle Eastern textures and sensibilities, and physical manifestations of the squiggles Bach applied so dexterously and deftly to his scrolls of sheet music paper.

The latter, in the context of the festival, applies primarily to the program finale at the Jerusalem YMCA auditorium on March 11 (8 p.m.). The date sees Miriam Engel roll out her choreography and onstage steps, alongside Romania-based Argentinean counterpart Juan Cruz and a quartet of JBO instrumentalists, including Shemer.

The concert goes by the name of “Sei Solo,” which, taken at linguistic face value, is habitually translated as “Six Solos for Unaccompanied Violin.” However, it has been noted that there may be a double entendre at play there, and it could be interpreted as “You are alone.” That hypothesis gains more credence when we consider the fact that Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara, suddenly died while he was away on a working trip.

Bach returned to a fresh grave, and it has been suggested by, for example, German musicologist Helga Thoene, that the D minor partita, particularly its chaconne, was composed as a lament for his late wife. It is not hard to see how Theone arrived at that notion, as the piece fairly drips with heavy emotion throughout. Other cognoscenti have contended that Bach was more likely to craft a sacred-leaning score for such an occasion.

Be that as it may, Engel is more fully focused on putting some of that sonic eloquence into expressive corporeal form, offering her audience an additional sensorial guide to Bach’s line of musical thought.

Engel, who has featured classical music in her output before, says she needed to have her wits about her as she got down to choreographic brass tacks. “Bach would have not been my natural first choice of music to set to dance,” she surprises me. “There is something mathematical and intellectual about much of his work. I prefer working with more emotional material, things with a more storytelling narrative.”

But, as we know, artists are made of sterner stuff, and their work ethic embraces the trials of the unknown and, often, the seemingly unfriendly. “It was a very interesting challenge for me,” she notes. Thankfully, she wasn’t on her own. “The process, working with David [Shemer] to select the repertoire, was fascinating and involved a lot research.”

Then again, I posit, having a firmly structured mellifluous substratum could provide a solid anchor for taking – creative, as well as physical – leaps and bounds knowing there’s a dependable landing strip to fall back on as she soars into the ethereal domain. “Yes, that’s true,” Engel concedes. Still, art is very much about the heart, is it not? “Working in the studio was very much about extracting feelings from the music,” she adds.

As an avid music listener – I presume I am not alone here – Bach’s oeuvre often sets my pulse racing and sparks both my imagination and deepest feelings. I would also have thought that, considering Bach wrote the compositions in the wake of his wife’s passing, Engel might have latched onto the emotive baggage that is inherent in the post-mourning venture. “What we are dealing with here [with “Sei Solo”] is the loneliness and yearning for love and a bond,” she says. “That appears in the biography of these works and between the notes.”

It took a while, but she got there in the end. “It was a voyage of searching which, in one sense, is a wonderful process – not knowing everything up front.” That, surely, is integral to the creative continuum in general. If artists knew exactly what they were going to end up with, that would probably be painfully boring, both for them and, by extension, for us, the end user.

It must also be said that the audience is there to not only consume but, hopefully, also to appreciate the fruits of the artist’s labors. The paying customers also complement and complete the work as they react to and feed off the consummation of the often arduous creative gestational timeline. That can involve dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, and filling in ostensibly void spaces.

In the case of the “Sei Solo” show, that is a programmatic given. “We don’t perform every piece in the series,” Engel notes, which leaves room for maneuver on all sides of the entertainment equation. “We perform 10 pieces which have a kind of incidental connection between them. We don’t do all of the sonata trio; we do not address all the details and minutiae of the series. They are fragments. So, to devise something from that, to form a complete narrative using only my imagination in the studio was tough.”

It was, Engel says, a matter of using the adverse conditions as a springboard. “When you look at what you have and say that is the given, then you can use the constraints to spawn the freedom you need.” That makes for a definitely positive approach, and one which is a requisite building block of the artistic ethos.

“That is not something I take for granted. Regretfully, there are many artists who turned their back on me after Oct. 7 – institutions and individuals. That is very saddening. One would expect artists in particular to be able to see their way past the politics and to connect with something else, something more human.” Happily, Cruz has proven his human worth and was already well into the rehearsal process here by the time I hooked up with Engel.

Considering Bach’s openness, as a composer and an instrumentalist, and in his view of how others can go about refashioning his offerings, I put it to Engel that the Late Baroque Era composer would, in all probability, have taken a shine to her choreographic endeavor. She liked that idea and ran with it into comedic climes. “We’d sit down together and work out what to do with the pieces,” she laughs.

Back into a more serious professional mode, Engel points out that her dance exploits are fueled by the scores in question but also by their rendition and the way the four instrumentalists, who will be on the stage with her and Cruz, approach the task at hand, as well as the energy they bring to the plate. “The fact that we will be performing with a live ensemble – in dance you often work with a playback – means there is an interpretation by the musicians.”

Engel says she can also allow herself “liberties” with the score. “I can, for example, tell the flutist to extend a note and then continue with the variations when I make this or that gesture. We do allow ourselves a degree of makeover to Bach’s work.”

Which is just the way it should be. Yes, there are always the traditionalists or purists who want to hear a piece of music just the way they know it from a recording or, for the more professionally trained, from the sheet music itself.

But if musicians were to reproduce scores repeatedly as is, we might as well just give an LP a spin, watch a concert on YouTube, or drop into Spotify or some other virtual platform. There’d be absolutely no point in shelling out cash and making the effort to go to a concert hall to catch a – presumably – tweaked rendition rolled out right before our eyes and ears. “That makes it interesting,” Engel observes. “I think that if Bach were alive today, he’d go with my flow,” she chuckles.

“Sei Solo” is the first time Engel has sparred professionally with the JBO, although she says she is developing a taste for fusing her art form with musicians. “You could say there is a pattern that has developed for me over the past few years. I am intrigued by the interplay of musical bodies, singers, musical directors, and others with dance, specifically coming from unexpected perspectives.”

And she has the bio credentials to support that claim across various genres and styles. “I have worked with [popular singer-songwriters] Shlomi Shaban and Arkadi Duchin and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and [internationally acclaimed jazz trumpeter] Avishai Cohen. These junctures between dance and music are, on the one hand, obvious.

But, on the other hand, contemporary dance generally rests on more abstract elements.”

Baroque music and dance do not, it must be said, make for instantly recognizable natural bedfellows. “We do not perform classical dance on the stage, we don’t engage in the Baroque idiom per se.” It is that, Engel feels, which proffers the compelling added value. “I increasingly work with these unexpected marriages, of contemporary dance and different musical genres, which led me to this interface with the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra.”

There is plenty more to look forward to across the decade-closing event, with the likes of classically trained jazz and ethnically leaning pianist Omri Mor taking a particularly unfettered approach to Bach’s scores. Over the past 20 or so years, Mor has wowed audiences here and abroad with his mesmerizing, seamless delivery as he leapfrogs a broad spectrum of styles and genres. That will no doubt be the case when he takes the YMCA stage for his “Swinging Bach” piano recital on March 7 (8 p.m.).

The repertoire, overseen by wind instrument player and musical director Alma Meir-Nir, with a vocalist and five other instrumentalists in the cast, cites from a generous swath of works written by the likes of 15th-century Polish composer Nicolaus de Radom; Middle Baroque Danish composer and organist Dieterich Buxtehude, who influenced Handel, as well as Bach; and 17th-century German composer and organist Johann Pachelbel, with Bach’s Chorale Prelude – from the Schübler Chorales set – opening the concert proceedings.

Elsewhere in the week-long schedule, there is an organ recital by Yulia Shmelkina, featuring Israeli premieres of two works that were attributed to Bach less than a year ago, and the stratified “Bach – Then and Now” show with the JBO, conducted by both Shemer and Zvi Carmeli, performing works by Telemann and Bach, as well as contemporary charts by now 90-year-old Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and 98-year-old Israeli composer Tzvi Avni.