JS Bach, International Man of Mystery

Tis the season – auditions, auditions, auditions. And of course many of the doctoral auditioners are from overseas, heavily Asian by origin. And nowadays before being offered an assistantship, that holy grail of graduate study, they have to pass a Speak Test. Not as easy as it might be – designed for graduate assistants who teach lecture classes, and who use mathematical language on a daily basis, it might just not be the perfect fit for a pianist who expects to teach one-on-one piano lesson!
But I digress. Today’s learning point for this teacher involved an international image! Bach, again ( it’s interesting that Bach, like the Liszt Sonata that we skimmed through in Piano Lit last week) is a pianistic Rorschach test – we hear the pianist you are, be that one primarily of intellect, of emotion, of digital dexterity – there is room for all, and food for all. The work was the C minor Partita of JSB – a favorite of many, to be sure. The student, a very fine pianist, grew up in Korea, moved to New Zealand for 5 or 6 years, and is now trying the USA for her doctoral work. The problem at hand was a tendency to weaken in the measure before reaching one of those cadences that Daddy B makes us long for, which sort of left me high and dry before time, as it were. The analogy that of countries – yes, there is a tapering at the cadence, since the tension that was so skillfully built is resolved at the moment of cadence (of “falling”), but not so much or so soon!! The analog was that while there is a softening, a yielding, we must stay in the same country until after the cadence, at which point JS often sets off in a new direction, seeking a new horizon as it were. Quite different from the Romantics really, who are surely members of the EC at heart – slipping imperceptibly from one region to another, nary a passport to be seen.
Worked a treat!