The Art of Fugue
Gladsmuir Parish Church, 13/9/24
Fretwork
And so to Gladsmuir, to the west of Haddington, another delightful little church in East Lothian, where Fretwork, who we heard yesterday with Helen Charlston in Humbie, played a concert of Bach and Purcell, themed around the famous ‘Die Kunst der Fuge’ (The Art of Fugue). Written in the last decade of J S Bach’s life, as he struggled to cope with blindness, this incomplete work for unspecified instrumentation is the culmination of a composing career dedicated to producing a wealth of material examining almost all the possibilities of musical creation. The fourteen fugues on a single theme are ‘an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject’ (Christoph Wolff).
Now, if this sounds a rather dry academic exercise, well, it sort of is, and therein lay the slight drawback of this concert. Partnered with a series of ‘fantazias’ (Purcell’s spelling) for viol consort, written in 1680 when the composer was 20 years old, which also explored contrapuntal mysteries, the music today had an academic feel that, despite superb playing by Fretwork, left this listener somewhat cold. The reaction of many in the audience, gleaned in conversation afterwards, was of a sameness in the music, which, although clearly enormously varied in the complexity of invention, meant that we were left wanting something more. Unless you are a real expert, one fugue is very like another, and while admirable in many ways, it can all begin to merge in one’s hearing as a contrapuntal maze. The fact that it was a cold autumn day outside, and the church, admirably full as usual in the Lammermuir Festival, was nicely heated, the tendency to drift off was hard to combat.
This is not fair really to the admirable Fretwork, five players instead of yesterday’s six, who played brilliantly as usual, but it was what it was. Actually there were a couple of tuning glitches and false notes in the first half which suggested that even they were not ‘in the zone’, but in general, they kept up the tradition of the group as the finest viol consort in the world. Emilia Benjamin and Jonathan Rees (treble viol), Joanna Levine (tenor viol) and Sam Stadlen and Richard Boothby (bass viol) combine seamlessly to create a sound world which is unique and stunning, a full smooth sound, which, in their vibrato-less playing, is fitted perfectly to the mellow sonorities of the viols.
What Bach would have made of this instrumentation for his Art of Fugue is unknown, but he was famous for spreading his music around a variety of instruments and voices, and, although accepted wisdom is that ‘Die Kunst der Fuge’ was intended for a keyboard instrument, Fretwork’s version is valid. There is some debate about whether Bach left this work unfinished deliberately or not, and Richard Boothby, in his amusing and informative programme notes, offers a good case for the idea that Bach left the resolution of the puzzle up to his successors or students. Indeed, he has himself put together a version of the missing 47 bars, which to my unrefined ears, sounded pretty convincing!
For many in the audience, the highlight of the programme was not by Bach but by Purcell, the clever ‘Fantazia upon One Note’, in which the note C remains unchanged and sounded throughout the contrapuntal workings weaving around it. Sam Stadlen earned himself a special bow for his beautifully focused playing of that C!
I’d like to give a note of commendation, by the way, to the Lammermuir Festival for the excellence and simplicity of the programmes throughout the festival. After the debacle surrounding the Edinburgh International Festival’s ham-fisted attempts at programmes, with free sheets which told us nothing and overpriced ‘Souvenir Programmes’ which told us next to nothing, the simple A4 pages stapled together here have been a model of concise information about the music and the performers.
So, to sum up, this was an interesting concert, but perhaps not quite interesting enough.
