Basso Profundo

Despite having been written some 250 years apart, these pieces by J.S. Bach (1685–1750) and Mieczysław Weinberg (1919–1996) seem to emerge from similar realms of profound, possibly tragic, emotion. These challenging works demonstrate the double bass’s great potential and dimensionality as a solo instrument. Edwin Barker’s range and experience as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestral double bassist, and teacher are the foundation for these penetrating, resonant performances.

Double bass lends increased weight to Bach’s C minor Suite No. 5, composed originally as one of six such suites for unaccompanied cello. The bassist performing this piece encounters not only the difficulty of playing cello music on a much larger instrument, but of playing music written for an instrument whose strings are normally tuned a fifth apart. Barker’s bass, like most, is tuned in fourths, here in “solo” tuning (F#BEA). Given its difficulty and scope, Barker calls the C minor suite his “Everest,” recalling violinists’ designation for Bach’s D minor solo Chaconne.

Bach wrote the cello suites over a few years in the 1710s, one of his most fruitful periods for instrumental music. Along with the cello suites, he wrote the six sonatas and partitas for solo violin and the six Brandenburg concertos, among other collections. The Cello Suites are all six movements — a prelude plus five standard dance types. The Prelude of the C minor Suite is unique among the suites in being a prelude and fugue. The dances are the moderate, stately Allemande, in duple meter; the livelier Courante, in triple; the lugubrious Sarabande, a double Gavotte, its first part insistently rhythmic, the second half lighter and flowing; and the concluding Gigue, relatively charming and light in the context of this dark piece.

Moisey Weinberg — or Mieczysław Vainberg — was born in Warsaw into a musical family. He studied at the Warsaw Conservatory but in 1941 his Jewish family was captured and killed by the Third Reich. He fled to Minsk and settled eventually in Moscow, where he was befriended by Dmitri Shostakovich. Weinberg suffered further antisemitism in the Soviet Union despite Shostakovich’s support and was briefly imprisoned for anti-Soviet activities. He was incredibly productive: he wrote 22 symphonies and other orchestral works, concertos for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and trumpet, 16 string quartets, and sonatas for most of the common orchestral instruments, with or without piano. For most of his life his music was virtually unknown in the West.

Weinberg wrote multiple solo sonatas for violin, viola, and cello, but apparently only one for double bass, written in quick succession with sonatas for solo cello and solo viola. Compared to its siblings, the double bass sonata is more expansive and suite-like, with six highly characterful movements. The opening Adagio and fifth-movement Lento are primarily lyrical; the faster movements are linked by a staccato gesture that helps tie the piece together as a whole. The piece is prevailingly dark but not humorless or dour, exhibiting throughout what Barker hears as “nobility that finds its way out of darkness.”

— Robert Kirzinger

Robert Kirzinger is a writer and composer based in Boston MA, where he has been on the staff of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1998.