Playing With Bach: A Conversation with Gwyn Roberts and Richard Stone
If you attend a performance of Bach's organ trio sonatas, you might expect to hear an
organ. Or maybe even a trio of organs.
Fuhggeddaboudit! There aren't any organs in Tempesta di Mare's Bach organ sonatas.
You won't miss them, though. Instead of organs, what you get is recorder, violin, viola,
lute, cello and harpsichord playing some of Bach's sunniest repertoire. "They're little
masterpieces, compact but vibrant," says Tempesta di Mare Artistic Co-Director Gwyn
Roberts.
And they were probably written for other instruments in the first place. These pieces are
called organ trio sonatas because the manuscript shows six sonatas (that's the sonata part)
scored for three melodic lines (that's the trio) played on the two keyboards and pedal
board of an organ (the organ). "But they're almost certainly Bach's transcriptions of trio
sonatas he'd written for various combinations of instruments, like two violins and
continuo or recorder and violin and continuo. These other trio sonatas are lost," says
Roberts. The organ transcriptions might have been meant for household enjoyment on the
parlor organ, she thinks.
A few alternate versions—or original versions—survive. For a little taste of Bach
scholarship (a field of multitudinous "might have beens"), consider that Sonata 1 exists in
a trio arrangement for violin, obbligato cello and continuo, but with a different middle
movement. The middle movement of that version also appears in the A major sonata for
flute and harpsichord, which was probably in turn a version of a now lost sonata in C for
recorder, violin and continuo. The middle movement of Sonata 3 turns up as a trio for
flute, violin and obbligato harpsichord in the A Minor Triple Concerto. The first
movement of Sonata 4 opens the second part of Cantata 76 as a trio for oboe d'amore,
viola da gamba and continuo….et cetera, et cetera, and so forth, and those are just for the
versions that still exist.
Whatever other permutations might have been out there is anyone's guess, as Bach
himself seems to have been not finicky at all about instrumental integrity.
Understandably, musicians eager to return these intimate-feeling gems to multiinstrumental performance see the "organ" of the organ sonatas as more-or-less generic.
Consequently, the organ sonatas get played in instrument combinations ranging from
lutes and flutes to clarinets and guitars to string and brass quartets. There's even the
unsubstantiated rumor of a koto ensemble. "And they almost always sound great," says
Roberts. "Because Bach's music relies more on the shape of the lines than grace or
ornament, it's almost performer-proof."
"Our own approach," says Artistic Co-Director Richard Stone, who arranged the works
for Tempesta, "is to consider them as chamber music and have some fun with them."
With those complex, Bachian lines that imply dialogue even when standing alone (think
of the unaccompanied violin partitas and cello suites, where one instrument sounds like
three or four), it was just the next step to turn the organ sonatas back into small-group
works.
In his scores, Stone intensified echoing and interweaving between the voices. He boosted
counterpoint between the voices as they trade off. To expand the sense of conversational
interchange in Sonatas 5 and 6, he added fourth lines with a second violin and a viola,
respectively. "The original voice is still there, but it's being passed among instruments,"
he says.
He expanded and intensified Sonata number 4, too, the one sonata of the group that
actually sounds the best on keyboard. While cutting the number of players down to two
by scoring it as a duet between lute and harpsichord, he increased the number of voices
from three to four. In Stone's arrangement, each instrument plays its own melody and an
independent bassline, while still audibly locking in one with the other. Bach's own
orchestration of his C major harpsichord concerto inspired Stone's version.
Stone doesn't see his role as second-guessing Bach. It's more like re-imagining. "The
sonatas work perfectly well as a trio sonatas for solo keyboard, but you could say that in
our multi-instrument version, they live up to their potential."
Roberts chimes in. For her, the new arrangements provide a precious opportunity to
share great work among players. "Moving the trio sonatas away from a single player on
a keyboard to whole a group is like taking a play that you're used to reading by yourself
and then performing it with actors," says Roberts. "Each part becomes a living thing
when it's adapted by the person playing it and changing in response to the other players."
Stone agrees. "After all," he says, "music making isn't just about truth, beauty and all
those dull, high-minded things. It's also a great conversation that you have with your
colleagues.
"Now, that's some fun."