Bach and Beyond

Gabriela Montero

album cover

Beyond the Notes, a New Window onto Bach

Classical music is often treated as a fixed entity: The score is absolute, to be followed with reverence, and the interpreter is expected to go only so far to embellish a piece. These are awesome works of genius, goes the thinking, and they must be treated with kid gloves.

That's a strange modern notion. Bach, Mozart, and Liszt, great improvisers all, wrote with the expectation that future interpreters would cut loose a little and reconfigure as the occasion demanded. To facilitate that, Bach conceived his music in orderly cycles and steps. Any musician who understands his general harmonic logic—the scheme of chords moving in sequence, sometimes threaded together by a corresponding melody—can take Bach far from the page. (And many have, including jazz pianists Keith Jarrett and Jacques Loussier.)

To experience a journey that's based on Bach but doesn't follow him note for note, check out Argentine pianist Gabriela Montero's rendition of "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." She begins with a fairly conventional statement of the theme, but soon enough plunges into different key centers—first, the relative minor, then a minor key a few doors down. Her lines glance at the general trajectory of the original text, and somehow manage to slide just enough into the exotic to prompt a rethinking: Your ear knows how the chords are supposed to resolve, and yet Montero is pulling someplace else, into a less expected and more emotionally expansive zone.

Montero makes her living as a concert pianist. In the liner notes she explains that she kept her improvisational musings to herself until she played for the legendary pianist Martha Argerich (see p. 25), who encouraged Montero to develop this dimension of her talent. That was a blessing. Here's a thoughtful and exceedingly alert musician who's tethered to Bach and rebelling against him at the same time, whose murmuring approach opens a new window into his music, whose shadings and whims and melodic leaps stray from the score just enough to call attention to the awesome architecture embedded deep within it.

Genre: Classical
Released: 2006, EMI
Key Tracks: "Jesu," "Joy of Man's Desiring," "Adagio, Prelude in C."
Catalog Choice: Gabriela Montero
Next Stop: Keith Jarrett: Shostakovich: The Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87
After That: Jacques Loussier Trio: The Brandenburgs
Book Pages: 514–515

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Comments:

#1 from Michael Dozier, Irvine, CA USA - 12/10/2008 5:37

Hi Tom,

On my lunch break today I browsed the book at the local Borders. I read the entry on Gabriela Montero. She is not from Argentina, she was born in Caracas, Venezuela.

I’ve really enjoyed the book and both of the podcasts on NPR. I hope you do more.

thanks,

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About 1,000 Recordings

Celebrate the joy, the revelation, the mystery, the fun, the sheer shivers-up-the-spine pleasure of great music.

Essential operas. Milestone rock albums. An education in the blues. The world of world. Classical from Bach to Bartók to Beethoven to Brahms. And dozens of unexpected gems, surprising discoveries, and long-lost masterpieces.

This is an online version of the list (published alphabetically in the book). The entries in the book break down genre bias and broaden every listener’s horizons—think Miles Davis to Claude Debussy to the melodic story-songs of The Decemberists. And the writing is passionate, informed, opinionated.

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