The MacDowell Colony is proud to collaborate with the Mariposa Museum in presenting a special edition of MacDowell Downtown this Saturday, June 18, at 3 p.m. Violinist, writer, and filmmaker Paul Festa will perform a free mini-concert of two Bach pieces: Sonata #3 in C and Partita #3 in E for solo violin. The event will be presented in the upstairs gallery of the Mariposa Museum where the wonderful sculptures of MacDowell Fellow Rich Entel also will be on display.
Bach composed his six solos for violin while employed by the Calvinist Prince Leopold of Cöthen. As a Lutheran church musician, Bach devoted most of his compositional energies to sacred music. According to Festa, Cöthen “put Bach to work writing music for the house band (in which the prince played harpsichord and viola da gamba).” The result was some of Bach’s greatest works, including the six “Brandenburg” concertos, the six cello suites, and the violin solos.
Festa first encountered these works at the age of 14 when he learned the first sonata, in G minor. Thirty years later, he performed the entire cycle for the first time, and he is now in the process of recording the pieces to be shown with accompanying original films.
“The violin solos stand alone in the violin repertory,” says Festa. “Other composers, most successfully Bartók, have modeled solo works on them, but no example by predecessor or successor has broken into the core repertory, while Bach’s have become its foundation…. Bach managed the miraculous feat of sustaining enormously complex multi-voiced (contrapuntal) music on an ostensibly single-voiced instrument.”
Festa, who teaches documentary film and fiction writing at Bard College Berlin, is developing three works concurrently: a performance about the political and social upheavals of 1979, a novel about medical marijuana in California, and films of the six violin sonatas and partitas by Johann Sebastian Bach. This Saturday Festa will perform the last two pieces of the series first: Each piece is 15 to 20 minutes, making for a short but memorable concert in the beautifully restored space upstairs at the Mariposa. During his six-week MacDowell Fellowship, Festa plans to perform all six pieces in three mini-concerts.
To hear Bach’s genius as interpreted by performance artist Paul Festa, don’t miss the opportunity to attend this concert at The Mariposa Museum this Saturday afternoon at 3 p.m.