Bach: A Strange Beauty

A parent of one of my students brought over a new CD to share with me. It is "Bach: A Strange Beauty." The pianist is Simone Dinnerstein. She performs a mixture of solo and concerto selections. I didn't know about her, I don't get out much. I enjoyed listening to the CD and I also enjoyed the liner notes. She uses the quote:

"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion"

-Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

She goes on to discuss Bach's music and compares it to different paintings of famous painters as well as some large scale pieces painted by her father. She talks about how Bach at first seems predictable and follows all these rules but then at some critical moment breaks the rules, changing the harmony or putting the melody on an off-beat. That is the strange beauty. She had small copies of the paintings and brought out examples of incongruities in the paintings as well. I enjoyed thinking about this and I listened to the music a little differently because of having read the liner notes.

I think Bach is under-rated and under-played. High school kids don't seem to think it is cool. I was really uplifted when one of my busy high school kids chose to tackle all three movements of the Italian Concerto. There was quite a bit of Bach on the Advancing Recitals last weekend and I really enjoyed it. There were those moments of terror where the student falters and you pray and cross your fingers and visualize her weaving her way back into the real notes.

There is a strange beauty all right and it can make Bach terribly difficult to perform confidently. I was so nervous to perform Bach on a recital in college that I forgot to play a whole dance from the French Suite I was performing. If you put one wrong finger number on a note you might run out of fingers and crash. My Dad never liked me to play Bach, he said it was five dollars work for a dollars pay. Not much flash for the effort.

Sometimes when our organist Kris Henry shoots off a four part Bach fugue, as a postlude that not that many people are even listening to as they exit, I can't believe it. It takes a special kind of brain work to do that.

I think I will try to listen to more Bach in February. February is a good month for that. I'm going to listen to: Two Part Inventions, The Goldberg Variations, Preludes and Fugues from Books I and II, the French Suites, and I think I will go out and buy my own copy of "A Strange Beauty." If I try to get it from itunes I won't have those great liner notes. That should about get me through February.

Here is Calvin playing some Bach, the Invention No. 1 in C Major.