MONTREAL — The Festival International Bach Montréal — the French name is official — ranges far and wide in its quest to celebrate the great J. S. Among the grander 2025 undertakings was a performance Nov. 21 of Mendelssohn’s arguably neo-Bachian oratorio Elias as led by the Montreal-born composer Samy Moussa. The Dec. 7 closer is slated to be the St. John Passion with the visiting Bach Stiftung St. Gallen choir under the Swiss conductor Rudolf Lutz.
Not all of the concerts are grandly scaled. View the festival through the other end of the telescope and you find an accordion recital by Théo Ould (which I contrived to miss) and a program of transcriptions by the Berlin-based consort of viols Phantasm (which I heard, at the appropriately intimate setting of Bourgie Hall, on Nov. 28).
Bach is the most elemental and adaptable of composers. Modern-piano performances of works written for harpsichord or clavichord are obviously legion. Many boomers got their first dose of the master through synthesizer renderings by Wendy Carlos on the million-selling album Switched-On Bach. The Goldberg Variations are often performed by a string trio. Chris Thile has been making hay with violin partitas and sonatas reworked for the mandolin. Orchestral arrangements of organ works by Leopold Stokowski still have some standing in the repertoire.
Transcribing Bach for a consort of viols — adapting music written in Germany in the first half of 18th century for an ensemble that enjoyed its heyday in England 100 years earlier — is another matter. What Phantasm gave us in Montreal, remarkably, was Bach’s music as Orlando Gibbons, accepting delivery of the scores through the agency of a time machine, might have heard it.
Is this a valid exercise? Bach wrote three sonatas for viola da gamba and included two of these instruments in his scoring of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6. Whether the “violone” found in this work and in the cantatas is a bass instrument of the viol type or a double bass is debatable, but for the most part Bach seems to have regarded the viol family as passé.
Academic considerations must surrender, of course, to real-life aesthetic experience, and while the succession of 24 (or so) transcriptions of keyboard works had its hypnotic moments, the Phantasm players (three or four according to contrapuntal need) did not make a strong case for the consort of viols as a Bachian medium. Uniform dynamics lent a walrussy sameness to the proceedings. Fugues famous for their depth and complexity seemed to come and go without commitment or comment. The tempo of choice was usually moderato.
Part of the problem was the playlist. Laurence Dreyfus, artistic director of the ensemble, chose preludes and fugues mostly from Book 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier rather than their better-known cousins in Book 1. (Other sources were The Musical Offering, the Clavier-Übung III, and the Inventions.) Pieces were given in apparently random order, broken by arbitrary applause breaks that also occasioned interminable tuning sessions.
Stage seating was similar to that of a string quartet: Dreyfus and Emilia Benjamin (treble viols) to the left and Jonathan Manson (tenor) and Markku Luolajan-Mikkola (bass) to the right. All the instruments were played “gamba” style, resting between the knees or legs. The trebles were 17th-century originals, the others modern copies. This I discovered by asking. Information in the printed program was not exactly abundant.
Lighting was low in any case, and the print was small. It was hard to keep track of what was being played. There was at least one false start in the second half. Not an audience-pleasing evening, by the sound of it, but this was Montreal, a city with a robust early-music culture and a formidable cohort of students. The crowd was larger, younger, and more enthusiastic than it would have been elsewhere on the continent. Several festival concerts (including that accordion recital) have been sellouts.
Though seldom seen on this side of the Atlantic, Phantasm is a known quantity across the pond, with award-winning recordings to its credit. The encore on this occasion, Scarlatti’s Sonata in B minor, K. 87, suggested that a program of less strictly contrapuntal fodder would be worth hearing.
It is interesting to note that this concert did not represent a Montreal debut for Dreyfus, who played the Bach gamba sonatas on April 14, 1985, in McGill University’s Pollack Hall with the harpsichordist Réjean Poirier (1950-2020), the co-founder of the Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal. Dreyfus graciously included a note in the printed program dedicating the Phantasm concert to Poirier’s memory.
