Family values passed down from a unique master: 'Bach Legacy' opens Indy Baroque season

It's pure coincidence that this post involves significant landmarks involving the number 2 followed by one zero or more. Johann Sebastian Bach's achievements include the frequently mentioned one that he fathered 20 children. 

But wait, there's more! This review of Sunday afternoon's "Bach Heritage" concert by the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra is the 2,000th post on my blog, jayharveyupstage. Nearly all of them are reviews of the performing arts in central Indiana, so I need to express gratitude to many arts presenters who have given me access to events from the start (May 2013).

Barthold Kuijken playing the traverso flute

Moving quickly to the legacy of J.S. Bach, I can't put it in context better than the Oxford Companion to Music: "Providing the most remarkable array of musical talent ever chronicled within a single family group, [over 70 Bachs] served at some time as professional musicians...from the early 16th century to the 18th." 

Of Johann Sebastian's score of children by two wives, five of the six sons to survive infancy forged sturdy reputations as composers. IBO artistic director Barthold Kuijken featured four of them with one work each in an illuminating concert at Second Presbyterian Church. 

The concert culminated worthily with Kuijken's performance of a Flute Concerto in D by Johann Christian Bach, to whom is attached the epithet "the London Bach" for his many years of residence and influence in the English capital. In Baroque parlance, Kuijken's instrument is called "traverso" to distinguish it from the end-blown recorder; the performer's air is directed across a hole atop the flute as in the modern flute.

Directing batonless in the tuttis, Kuijken gave special life as well to the solo role. The brief cadenzas had fervor and focus, with a remarkably sustained tone in the middle movement (Larghetto). He also imparted individuality to the episodes in the Rondeaux finale, ramping up the virtuosity in the final one.

In a position to know genius when he encountered it, Johann Christian was impressed by the 8-year-old Wolfgang Mozart when the prodigy visited London with his father and sister.  

Here's another Mozart connection: The most individualistic of J.S. Bach's composing sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel, was represented on Sunday's program by his Symphony in G, which was commissioned by what we might call today a high-profile influencer, Gottfried von Swieten, Austrian ambassador to Berlin. 

The nobleman's influence at home in Vienna comprised the mature Mozart (with Beethoven and Haydn completing the trifecta), who in 1982 wrote his father, "I go every Sunday at noon to Baron von Swieten — and there is nothing played but Handel and Bach." Coming into his own in his last decade of life, Mozart honed contrapuntal skills in these musicales, supplementing an earlier era's specialty in texture and construction, soon making great use of such learning in original masterworks like the "Jupiter" Symphony.

C.P.E.'s stylistic suavity and freshness was well-illustrated as the Symphony in G's Presto finale swept to its conclusion, having already displayed a few harbingers of Beethoven with its sudden accents and abrupt dynamic shifts.

The next-to-oldest Bach son of eminence, Johann Christoph Friedrich, falls into the same birth cohort as Haydn and a transatlantic nonmusical hero, George Washington (1732). On Sunday afternoon we heard his Sinfonia in D minor, a masterpiece in the galant style (as C. Matthew Balensuela's helpful program note indicates) and a way of knitting its inspirations together with scalar passages that lend extra momentum and a how-to-listen clarity. 

The concert opened with a sample of the oldest son to make a name for himself, Wilhelm Friedemann (1710). The bracing start to the Vivace first movement of his Sinfonia in F fully leaned into the dissonance that, according to Balensuela, gives the work its nickname. Later, in the third-movement Allegro, the echo phrases and the orchestra's manner of articulating the pickup notes were well defined. Particularly good in the church's responsive acoustics was the nice balance of violins and answering lower strings in the paired minuets of the finale.