Review

Apollo’s Fire: Bach, Telemann & the Bohemian Gypsies (April 16)

by Nicholas Jones

Music lovers are familiar with Romantic and modern composers’ fascination with the music of the “folk.” Kodály, Bartók, and Dvorák (among others) avidly traveled the countryside in search of tunes, rhythms and sensibilities outside the usual realms of what has come to be known as “classical music.” Less well documented are similar influences upon the composers of the eighteenth century.

“Gypsies” at Apollo’s Fire last week (we heard the performance at St. Paul’s, Cleveland Heights on Saturday, April 16) made a strong case for the influence of Eastern European gypsy music on baroque music. This musicological premise became the basis for a sparkling musical program in which the passion evident in gypsy music carried over into virtuosic performances of Telemann and Bach.

Both the scholarship and the soul in this musical adventure came from recorder and traverso virtuoso Matthias Maute, who teaches in Montréal and wrote these arrangements, both of gypsy music and of Bach, for his group Ensemble Caprice.

Gypsy music, like much folk music, constituted an aural — not a written — tradition among itinerant and perhaps musically illiterate (but tremendously talented) musicians. (Maute tells the story that Wagner, walking in the Bohemian hills, once came across a group of gypsies rocking out on the theme from Beethoven’s Septet!)

The gypsy music that Apollo’s Fire played derives from an eighteenth century manuscript in Slovakia. Written down here are short tunes, sometimes only six bars of unaccompanied melody, like dances in a fake book, that merely record the bare essentials of gypsy performances.

Maute (a composer as well as a performer and entrepreneur) has arranged these for baroque orchestra, harmonizing and extending the tunes. In his arrangements, they maintain a good deal of their strangeness: unusual rhythms, non-standard harmonies, modal lines. And in his performances, they retain the fire of their origins: he arranges and performs with fierce and thrilling flexibility, improvising, bending notes, emphasizing both pathos and passion. Sometimes his inventive arrangements sound as if Dvorák’s Dumky, with its quirky starts and stops, its combination of wildness and sadness, had by some strange wrinkle in time invaded a concerto by Vivaldi.

We know that Telemann spent two years in Poland and encountered gypsy music there. Exactly how that music’s “barbaric beauty” — his phrase — influenced his music is necessarily speculative. But certainly, hearing the wonderful E minor Telemann double concerto for recorder and flute in this gypsy context made the slow movements even more passionate and soulful than usual, and the fast movements more imbued with a wild energy. Maute was joined by local flutist Kathie Stewart in this concerto, and the two together appropriately pushed the bounds of reason in the speed, daring and excitement of the concert-closing, blood-tingling final movement. We could have been in the Bohemian woods around a great bonfire sending sparks flying into the air!

Telemann, Maute speculates, must have told Bach about his interest in the music of the gypsies. But if that filtered into Bach’s music, the case for such influence was not terribly evident in this concert. Maute and the group played adaptations of two well-known and not particularly gypsy-ish works by Bach, the Italian Concerto (despite its name, a piece originally for solo harpsichord), and the D minor harpsichord concerto. Adapted for the recorder as a solo instrument, these were fitting vehicles for Maute’s superb virtuosity, but smacked more of the courtly than the itinerant. 

The complex passage work of a Bach concerto, relentlessly exploring arpeggiations and variations natural to a keyboard or string player, are astonishing to hear on the recorder, if not completely satisfying to those who know the pieces in their more common forms. Playing with breakneck speed and yet with clarity and command, Maute had the audience on the edge of their seats with his daring. In his hands, the recorder nearly achieved a presence worthy of the intensity and depth of Bach.

As always with Apollo’s Fire, the backup orchestra was superb. In most pieces, though, a slightly smaller group would have been more effective; while they were diligent in holding back so we could hear the recorder, there were too many moments where the balance was in the other direction. The orchestra was led by the talented and charismatic Olivier Brault, who got a few passionate gypsy solos himself. I’m delighted that he will be concertmaster of the group for the upcoming season.

Nicholas Jones is Professor of English at Oberlin College and an avid amateur musician.

Published on ClevelandClassical.com April 19, 2011

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