MacDowell Fellow Paul Festa, at the MacDowell Colony for his second residency, will play the third of three Bach solo violin concerts at the Monadnock Center for History and Culture on Saturday, July 23, at 5 p.m.
Having performed two pieces in each of the prior concerts, he’ll play Bach’s Partita #1 in B minor and Sonata #1 in G minor to complete the suite of six unique compositions. After the concerts Festa will go into the studio to record these pieces, which he will then use as the basis for six short 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 was 14 years old when he learned to play the first sonata, in G minor. Thirty years later, he performed the entire cycle for the first time in Saratoga Springs, with Peterborough being his second public performance. The other four pieces, which Festa performed last month at the Mariposa Museum and earlier this month at All Saints’ Church, include Sonata #2 in A minor and Partita #2 in D minor, andSonata #3 in C and Partita #3 in E.
”Increasingly, people’s access to classical music — all music — is through YouTube, and my Bach film project is meant to address a surprising shortage of well-made video of these foundational works,” says Festa. “On a more personal level, the films will let me bring together two of my core pursuits, film and music, in a new way and in pursuit of a longstanding goal. Rather than use music to enhance film, as soundtrack, my project has always been about using film to illuminate music…. The primary visual element, apart from the performance, will be Bach’s autograph manuscript of the violin solos.”
The sonatas each consist of four movements, in a typical alternating tempo from slow to fast and back. The partitas, by contrast, are suites of popular 18th-century dances such as the allemande, courant, sarabande, bourrée and gigue.
Festa says that because he’s been playing these pieces for more than three decades, he finds the rapidity with which his interpretation and technique are evolving as remarkable. “Playing all six in proximity yields important comparative lessons,” he says. For example, he wonders if he might discover some previously hidden characteristic in the seemingly unrelated allemandes from two of the pieces. “These are questions best answered in performance, and the opportunity to present all six works in Peterborough is one of the great gifts, on a list that isn’t short, that MacDowell has given me.”
In addition to playing violin, Festa writes fiction and makes films about music. His first film “Apparition of the Eternal Church” captures the responses of 31 artists to the music of French composer Olivier Messiaen; his second “The Glitter Emergency” sets the story of a peg-leg ballerina to music from the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. His third film “Tie It into My Hand” explores the life of the artist in violin lessons Festa takes with artists of every description — from Margaret Cho, Alan Cumming, and Mink Stole to Barbara Hammer, Gary Graffman and Harold Bloom — except none are violinists.
On top of developing the Bach partita and sonata films while at MacDowell, Festa, who teaches courses in documentary film production and fiction writing at Bard College Berlin, is working on a documentary performance about the political upheavals of 1979 and also writing a novel about the medical marijuana movement in California.
If you are a lover of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music or a newcomer to it, you are in for a treat this Saturday at 5 p.m. when MacDowell Fellow Paul Festa gives voice to the master’s compositions in a free concert experience. Doors will open at The Monadnock Center’s Bass Hall at 4:40 p.m. and Festa will take questions from the audience after the performance.