Café Concerts

Bach has long proved irresistible to artists drawn to reimagining his music through a contemporary prism. Mahler and Busoni transcribed his works, and Leopold Stokowski orchestrated them. More recently, Bach has been arranged for banjo, accordion, jazz trumpet, string quartet, and even theremin.

The pianist Matt Herskowitz – no stranger to straddling the borders between jazz, classical and global styles – recently came to WQXR to present three of his jazz-inflected arrangements of Bach's work. Joining him were his Trio, plus two violinists from the classical world: Philippe Quint and Lara St. John. The set started with a ballad-like rendition of the Prelude to Bach's Cello Suite No. 1.

Quint, Herskowitz and the trio (featuring bassist Mat Fieldes and drummer David Rozenblatt) have joined forces for a recording called Bach XXI, featuring the pianist's arrangements of eight Bach favorites. Speaking with host Terrance McKnight, Herskowitz said that Bach's music is particularly adaptable to jazz because of its formal construction. "Bach's got one idea and builds upon that," said Herskowitz. "He doesn't just abandon an idea and go to something else. This makes it very fertile ground for arranging."

While Herskowitz has explored Bach in various settings over the years (including an arrangement from the Well-Tempered Clavier for the film "The Triplets of Belleville"), Quint admits that he is a relative newcomer to jazz. His childhood in the Soviet Union, he says, was "unbelievably conservative and strictly classical, where improvisation was not part of the vocabulary." But upon moving to the U.S. in 1991, he bought his first CD, a recording of John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things." After more than two decades of playing as a soloist with orchestras and in recitals, he decided it was time to revisit his love of swing.

"I like to be outside of my comfort zone," said Quint, laughing. "Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it's a disaster." Below is the Aria from the Goldberg Variations.

Joining the musicians in the final piece was the violinist Lara St. John. She has devoted much of her career to the partitas, sonatas and concertos of Bach (going back to her 1996 debut album). But she grew up in Canada listening to Celtic music, tango, old-time fiddling and Stéphane Grappelli albums (her next recording, playfully called "Shiksa," contains music from the Jewish Diaspora).

"Philippe and I are like yin and yang," she said. "He comes from a very straight-laced conservative background and I'm basically renegade, D.I.Y. background. So I've never been inside a box so I don't know what the outside is." The two violinists find common ground in Herskowitz's freewheeling arrangement of Bach's Double Concerto. Watch the performance below and listen to the full session at the top of this page.

Video: Kim Nowacki; Audio: Irene Trudel; Interview: Terrance McKnight; Text & Production: Brian Wise

Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the pianist, conductor and son of Russia's Nobel Prize-winning writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, came to WQXR recently with the violist Hsin-Yun Huang, to perform Soviet-era sonatas by Shostakovich and Prokofiev. When asked whether the program was intended as a commentary on modern-day Russia, given its widely-reported curbs on press and artistic freedom, Solzhenitsyn spoke carefully but emphatically.

"Music this great always transcends the bounds of its time and place of creation," he said. "During the Cold War, there was no doubt in my mind that the only real bridge between America and the Soviet Union was culture. To the extent that today unfortunately gives us a whiff of that time, music is the best way to remind what holds us together."

Solzhenitsyn knows a lot about the dreadful history of the 20th century through the tribulations of his late father, who spent eight years in Soviet labor camps after World War II. He grew up in Vermont when his father moved there with his family in 1976, after being exiled from the Soviet Union. He has built a career as both a pianist and conductor, and is currently principal guest conductor of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.

Huang, who organized this program (it was repeated days later at SubCulture), grew up in Taiwan and England, and is now a viola professor at the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music. The pair began with the second movement of Shostakovich's Viola Sonata, a work completed just weeks before his death in 1975.

Huang observes that Shostakovich, like Brahms, who wrote two works for viola near the end of his life, was particularly drawn to the "humanity" of her instrument. "There is something to the humanity of being from within [the orchestra texture]," she noted. "You can lead from within but you don't have to draw attention to yourself. There's that aspect of the personality of the instrument that I feel I identify with very much."

In this clip, Solzhenitsyn speaks further about the "big questions" asked by Shostakovich, who suffered from the personal persecution of Stalin:

Huang and Solzhenitsyn met some 25 years ago, then teenaged students at the Marlboro Music Festival, and they have kept up their friendship and occasional musical partnership since. Both now wear multiple hats in their careers, with Solzhenitsyn also actively promoting the legacy of his father (who died in 2008), through readings, publishing and translations of his work. In the below video, he performs the second movement of Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 8 (1944).

"It's a work that is very scary – with a capital "s" – in its outer movements," the pianist said. "But this middle movement to me seems unrelated. To me it's kind of a respite from the terror of war but one that does not result in any succor, in any amelioration, in any resolution. It's just the sweet memory that is gone no sooner than it's spoken."

Video: Amy Pearl (camera) & Kim Nowacki (editing); Audio: Irene Trudel; Production & Interview: Brian Wise

The post-performance adrenalin rush after a substantial recital at Zankel Hall had barely subsided when Gerstein appeared at WQXR. The Russian-born pianist spoke about his new recording of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev concertos, and gave this performance as the cameras were rolling.

Video: Kim Nowacki; Audio: Irene Trudel; Production: Brian Wise