Complicité is a term that I first heard from my son, who studied the teachings of the French theatre practitioner, Jacques Lecoq. Three important ideas that Lecoq communicated to his students were le jeu (playfulness), complicité (togetherness), and disponsibilité (openness). I was so intrigued by these ideas, and the different exercises that my son learned in order to cultivate these skills within ensemble acting, that I decided to try a Lecoq approach with my own musical ensemble, Baroklyn.
Baroklyn is a string ensemble that I direct from the keyboard. All of the musicians are wonderful collaborators, with years of experience playing chamber music. They are able to listen to how I imagine each piece of music and to use all of their own creativity to help bring that vision to life. Another aspect of the Lecoq approach is that it cannot be rushed. We are lucky enough to have plenty of rehearsal time, which enables us to explore many different ways of playing.
I’m very interested in irregularities within Bach’s music. There is so much variation in his writing, and each voice is saying something slightly different, yet all of the voices are speaking simultaneously. It is dense music to play and dense to hear. My biggest goal is to be able to communicate and hear those different voices, through differentiation of timbre, agogic distortion of rhythms, ebb and flow of tempo, and emphasis on the moments of expressive intervallic leaps and harmonic dissonances that jump out from the page.
With this in mind, Baroklyn and I experiment with rearranging some of the string distributions, playing with the idea of passing musical ideas to each other, and mixing up the music stands so that players of different voices are standing next to each other. We avoid ‘fixing’ our interpretations, to keep the music from becoming static. We have a plan, but are open to the moment. This way of making music is dependent upon listening, openness to change, and trust. It results in a feeling of togetherness.
– Simone Dinnerstein, February 2025
In designing the program for this album, I thought about Bach’s writing for the voice. All of the music here is related to that, either directly or indirectly. One of the most remarkable aspects of Bach’s writing for any instrument is that each voice, meaning each musical line, can be sung. The modern musical paradigm of the singer with a backup band doesn’t exist in Bach’s music. Every line is important. However, it is impossible for us to decipher all of those voices if we don’t balance between them. The give and take is happening all the time, as opposed to establishing one hierarchy of voices that remains constant over an entire song. The bass line in Bach’s writing is the ground upon which his world is built. I feel incredibly fortunate to have the bassist Lizzie Burns playing that role in Baroklyn. The vital presence that she brings to each work is a jumping off point for every voice above her.
The album begins with our arrangement of the chorale prelude, Herr Gott, nun schleuß den Himmel auf. I was first introduced to this chorale prelude when my friend Alan Fletcher wrote a beautiful arrangement of it for the oboist Peggy Pearson and me. Peggy and I decided to include some other musician friends in our first performance of it, and that gave me the idea to arrange it for Baroklyn. At our recording session, we continued to experiment with many different ways of distributing the voices between us. I always played the running notes and the bass line, but we tried using one instrument to a part for the chorale, one cellist playing pizzicato, Peggy weaving in and out of the texture, and our fabulous concertmaster, Rebecca Fischer, playing two voices together as double stops. We tried playing it slowly, with depth and legato. We tried playing it more quickly to hear the lightness and hope come through the dark murmuring of the keyboard’s right hand. In the end, we decided to play the entire piece twice, first in a slower and more sustained way and then repeating it with more freedom, gradually picking up the pace as we went, like a moving force gathering momentum.
I see that chorale prelude as truly preluding the concerto that comes after it. In fact, the silence on the recording between the first and second track always stays in the silence of the room tone, meaning the recorded silence of the concert hall. That quality of silence is different from the artificial silence that usually comes between recorded tracks, and to my ear that further connects one piece to the next.
Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in E Major, BWV 1053 is taken from two cantatas that he had already written. It was not uncommon for him to recycle material, and it’s always interesting to see the choices that he made regarding what he kept and what he left out. The first and second movements of the concerto are from Gott soll allein mein Herze haben, BWV 169. The first movement closely follows the opening instrumental sinfonia of the cantata, with the keyboard replicating the organ. The second movement is a reworking of the alto aria Stirb in mir, Welt. The keyboard is a type of amalgam of the alto and the organ, with some very unusual harmonic differences between the cantata and the concerto. The third movement is another reimagining of a sinfonia, this time from Ich geh und suche mit Verlangen, BWV 49.
Of course, not only did Bach reimagine his own music in creating this concerto, but we musicians are reimagining it further by playing it with a piano and modern string instruments. The piano’s ability to sustain, for example, enabled us to take a slower tempo in the second movement.That movement has outer sections which give the primary melodic material to the strings, and then a rather bare central section where the cellos and bass stop playing and a highly expressive aria is given to the keyboard. The violins and violas have a very long period of acting almost as a Greek chorus to the piano’s monologue. Each chordal interjection by the strings reflects the temperament of the piano’s expression at that moment. We regarded this section as an improvisation in which everyone participated.
Following the concerto, we move to the chorale Der Leibzwar in der Erden from Cantata 161. Originally this is sung by a choir doubled by strings, as well as an obligato played by flutes or recorders. In our version, the strings are playing without the choir, and Peggy and I play the obligato. During the rehearsal at our recording session, I asked the lower strings to try playing by themselves, in order to work on creating a certain type of blend in their sound and a longline to the phrasing. As they played, the upper strings started to join in and they ended by playing the whole chorale together. It sounded so beautiful that in the post-production of the album, I decided to link that rehearsal version to the version with obligato. I love how the process of creating became the creation itself.
This chorale is again acting as a prelude, leading into the strikingly beautiful and oddly contemporary cantata Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust. Peggy Pearson introduced me to the cantata through her gorgeous live recording with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and she also introduced me to the remarkable mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano. What a voice! And Jennifer’s earthiness and honesty as a person shine through in her singing.
The first aria is so rich and full bodied, that I imagined a different type of realization of the continuo part that would give it yet another layer of depth, especially since I am playing the organ part on a piano. I asked the composer, and my longtime collaborator and friend, Philip Lasser, if he would consider writing it. It is a continuo realization in that it follows the harmonies that Bach delineated, but Philip turns it into another contrapuntal line that sometimes surprises us and shifts the music in a slightly different direction. There’s one moment before the very final words that Jennifer sings, when Philip’s realization of Bach’s writing was so contemporary that I eliminated the cello/bass for two bars just to emphasize the almost Sondheim-like piano writing of that moment.
The second aria, Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen, is completely strange and unexpected. Bach eliminates the bass line, which is truly shocking. We are literally ungrounded. The keyboard’s right and left hands are both in the vocal range of the mezzo-soprano, and they are both highly chromatic and melismatic, winding this way and that with the most extraordinarily dissonant intervals outlined. The first and second violin parts, as well as the viola, are all playing in unison for the entire movement. Yet another shock. And amidst all of this, the singer is nested within these three independent voices of the keyboard’s right and left hands and the unison strings. She is singing in the exact same range of notes, as if a cat’s cradle has been formed around her voice.
In order to communicate most fully, we arranged the ensemble so that as much as possible, everyone could see each other. The strings and oboe d’amore formed a semi-circle around the piano, facing me. Jennifer was nestled into the piano, just to my right. That was particularly important in the opening and closing parts of this aria, which consist of a long phrase performed only by the unison strings and myself. The strings stop for breath every couple of notes, almost like someone crying and catching themselves. I asked the strings if they could move around the semi-circle one at a time, each playing a few notes and passing it to the next person during the breath. It is remarkable to hear this musical line divided between eight players, each with their own particular sound and inflection. If you listen closely, you can hear the music move from the left speaker to the right.
In the Air, the final work on the album, originates from the Air on the G String from Bach’s third Orchestral Suite. This is one of his most popular works today and is almost like a vocalise, a song without words. Again, I asked Philip Lasser if he might write a continuo realization for me. However, this time I envisioned it as an independent piece of music, like a jazz improvisation, that would happen simultaneously with the performance of the original air by the strings. What Philip wrote is truly a striking composition on its own, and it acts as a lens through which we see Bach’s music in a new light. This composition feels like a new medium – one piece of music inside another.
The fact that In the Air made it onto the album is a miracle in itself. It was the last piece that we recorded on the third and final day of sessions, which happened to be my birthday. Just as we began, with thirty minutes left of the session, one of the bass strings on the piano broke. What followed was a highly stressful and somewhat dangerous tying of this string, which is under 200 pounds of tension, by our piano technician, Barbara Renner, assisted by our recording engineer, Doron Schacter, who had to wield a hammer.
With Barbara tuning the wretched string between each take, I was so distracted by the danger of a piano catastrophe, that I didn’t even notice that the three first violins had decided to cluster in a triangle around one mic, and the two second violins around the antiphonal mic, to create a blended but more distant effect. Out of this chaos came Philip’s piece, an exquisite blend of beauty and sorrow. We felt something very special. A togetherness. Complicité
– Simone Dinnerstein, February 2025