Bach@7 presents new works by Rimple and Edwards

The high point of the concert was the best known piece on the program: Bach‘s cello suite in G Major. Eve Miller’s performance reminded me why I originally fell in love with live performances of Baroque music. She pushed the tempos and made dramatic switches in mood where appropriate, drawing me into the music by endowing it with the life that expressed the suite’s roots in dance. The fact that she was playing a cello built when Bach was 23 probably added something, too.

The program included two other Bachs: an oboe sonata and a trio sonata. The oboe sonata wasn’t as lively as the cello suite, but it was a good showcase for Geoffrey Burgess’s mastery of one of the most beautiful instruments the early music movement has rescued from obscurity. The Baroque oboe combines the sweetness of the recorder with some of the brilliance and edginess of the trumpet.

The trio sonata ended the program with a prime example of the standard chamber form of the Baroque. Most trio sonatas can be played with different combinations of lead instruments, and I’m especially partial to combinations that pair a wind instrument with a string. This performance paired the continuous flow of Burgess’s oboe with the more jagged line traced by Rebecca Harris’s violin, with Eve Miller and Leon Schelhase supporting them with a well proportioned cello-and-harpsichord accompaniment.

Not just Bach

The Bach@7 programs usually include one or two pieces, by other composers, that have some relationship to the Bach selections. This concert featured a pair of moderns: the premiere of Mystic Fragments by West Chester composer Mark Rimple and Two Pieces for Solo Oboe by Australian composer Ross Edwards.

Rimple is a lute player and early music expert. He composed Mystic Fragments for two instruments he’s familiar with: the Baroque violin and the long-necked bass archlute (played at this performance by Tempesta di Mare’s Richard Stone). As I understand the piece, you’re supposed to hear it as fragments heard in a dream or received from an alien land. The fragments in the first half are so short Rebecca Harris played just one note per fragment. In the second half they become longer multi-note phrases. The piece creates the mood it’s supposed to and the short fragments set the stage for the second half, but I would have liked Mystic Fragments better if the first section had been shorter.

The titles of Ross Edwards’s two oboe pieces are taken from Australian aborigine languages: Yanada (moon) and Upirra (flute or pipe). Edwards is one of his country’s most popular composers and it’s easy to see why. Yanada is a classic nocturne, with all the appeal of a night piece, but there’s nothing obvious or sentimental about it. The line traced by the oboe is stamped with the composer’s own personality and his own personal take on the subject.

That narrow path between originality and familiarity is one of the hardest paths an artist can follow. The artists who can do it without falling into clichés and sentimentality generally acquire a solid following.