Review: Northwest BachFest talent of Zuill Bailey, friend Awadagin Pratt swept the floors of Barrister Winery

The most recent musical offerings presented under the aegis of the NWBachfest and concocted by master musical chef Zuill Bailey was served up this past weekend at Barrister Winery. Bailey’s principal guest in two programs was his close friend, the distinguished American pianist, conductor and author Awadagin Pratt.

As some saw at his recital in April of last year, Pratt goes about constructing his programs carefully. He does not merely alternate happy and sad, or balance slow with fast. He creates sequences of works that reveal patterns and principles that have animated artistic creation over long spans and within very different cultures. Rather than settling with comfortable categories, such as Baroque and Impressionist, Pratt urges listeners to understand how composers employ their skills to cope with loneliness, express feelings of love or confront the inevitability of death.

Saturday’s program carried the subtitle “Seeking the Divine,” though only one work on the program, Olivier Messiaen’s “Louange a l’Eternite de Jesus,” was specifically religious, and performance of that work was moved to Sunday’s recital. We were tipped off that Pratt and Bailey had something in mind when Bailey instructed us not to applaud after the opening work, “Spiegel im Spiegel” (Mirror in Mirror, 1978) by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Rather, we were asked to remain silent at the end of that piece, while Bailey left the platform and Pratt began his performance of the four ballades (1854) of Johannes Brahms.

In keeping with Pärt’s customary style, “Spiegel im Spiegel” is a slow-moving, or rather, nonmoving piece that begins with an open F-major triad and quietly moves at a walking pace (andante) through other chord patterns without ever establishing a home tonality; Pärt’s intention was to use music as it was used by the church during the high Middle Ages: to aid the listener in contemplating creation as God does – without tension, without doubt, without awareness of change.

To have this followed without pause by works of Brahms – composer of his mighty C-minor symphony, the titanic D-minor piano concerto or the boisterous “Academic Festival Overture” – came as a shock, but only because one could detect so little difference.

These four works, composed in 1854 in the first flush of Brahms’ love for Clara Schumann, do not at all have the broad narrative sweep and extended architecture of the four famous ballades composed by Chopin between 1831 and 1843. Rather, they have the same ruminative, meditative quality of the Pärt piece, suggesting that, even in his early manhood (21 years) and at a time of great emotional stress, Brahms’ was essentially an inward-looking, contemplative spirit, unlike Beethoven, his lifelong idol, whose example he strove to equal in a sweepstakes competition for the title of “Germany’s Greatest Composer.”

Pratt’s rendition of the ballades traced all the subtleties of Brahms’ guarded, allusive utterances with the unruffled technical fluency and utter naturalness that are the hallmarks of his musicianship. As he did for us last year, he filled the hall at Barrister Winery with an unlimited spectrum of tone color.

Even when Beethoven composed in a gentler mood, his intended reach was universal, as we were able to hear in his Symphony No.6 in F major Op.68, the “Pastoral Symphony” (1808). In this warm-hearted, but nonetheless stupendous masterpiece, performed in an excellent arrangement for piano four hands, Beethoven portrays how the sounds and scenes of a country walk can fill a sensitive soul with a song of thanksgiving to God, such as Pärt seeks to do in “Spiegel im Spiegel.” In a rendition that thoroughly accomplished Beethoven’s intentions, despite the absence of strings, winds and brass, Pratt was joined at the upper portion of the keyboard by Soojin Kim, a Korean-born pianist who has performed extensively throughout Southeast Asia and Europe.

A contrast between Kim’s sharply etched, focused tone and Pratt’s warmer, expansive sound was apparent from the first measure, and served to enliven the texture throughout, in the way the more penetrating violins contrast in an orchestra with the rounder, more enveloping violas and cellos. Thus were we led through meadows and woodlands, through sunlight and storms to a vision of a creator whose benevolent spirit binds us all.

Another full house on Sunday afternoon enjoyed a program anchored by two pillars of the repertoire for cello and piano: the “Arpeggione” Sonata in A major of Franz Schubert (1824) and Beethoven’s Sonata No. 3 – also in A major – for Cello and Piano Op. 69 (1808).

Pratt led off the program with a performance of Bach’s Keyboard Concerto No. 4 in A major in an arrangement for solo piano. Pratt will perform the piece with the Spokane Symphony under James Lowe this coming Saturday and Sunday in the opening concert of the 2024-25 Masterworks Series. His performance on Sunday blew through Barrister like a thunderstorm. There was no effort to approximate the sound of a harpsichord, or to hew to 18th century performance practice. Rather, Pratt exploited the full resources of the modern piano, including the sustaining pedal, in order to share with us his own joy and Bach’s in the gifts of passion, wit and tenderness that were bestowed on both of them.

Pratt was then joined on the platform by his friend of nearly 40 years and longtime duet partner, Bailey, in a performance of the Schubert sonata named for the obsolete instrument – an ungainly combination of cello and guitar – for which it was written. The reason the sonata has not followed the instrument into obscurity is that is among a handful of the greatest works ever written for duet performance, and no amount of awkward shifts and other technical inconveniences is too great to keep it from being performed, especially if the performer is Bailey.

While keeping the range of tempi and dynamics within normal range, Bailey lavished upon the sonata a range of tone color that seemed utterly boundless. No array of microphones or high-resolution processors could capture the experience of being surrounded and borne aloft by the sound Bailey was inspired to produce for us; he has no equal.

This latest event in the Northwest BachFest season was concluded with the first work Bailey and Pratt performed together: Beethoven’s Sonata for Cello and Piano Op. 69. If you are looking for middle-period Beethoven at its finest, you need look no further: witty, virile, witty, songful, meticulously constructed and witty. The quicksilver banter between the players, which Bailey and Pratt executed with astounding speed and accuracy, inevitably recalled the description of the ping-pong competition detailed by Bailey in his introductory remarks.

It was over a ping-pong table that they first met, and it was that sport that cemented their friendship and led to the formation of their musical partnership in 1996. So full of passionate energy is the piece, so optimistic is its depiction of the human capacity to overcome fear and uncertainty, to forge unity out of difference, and so effective were Bailey and Pratt in communicating all this to the audience, that, had we been able not only to stand up and shout, but hang from the rafters at Barrister Winery, we would have.