- And we are going to move backwards in time

for the last time this afternoon,

to the C minor French Suite of Bach.

We'll be hearing the allemande, courante, and sarabande.

And Mackenzie Melemed is our pianist,

and I think we should be seeing him rather shortly (laughs).

(audience applauds) Hi Mackenzie.

All right.

(piano music)

(piano music)

(piano music)

(audience applauds)

I certainly don't rule out your playing more of it,

but I wanted to make sure we had time

to explore here a little bit. - Sure.

- And Mackenzie, one thing that you do,

which I am very, very happy about,

because it's not something one can take for granted,

is that you seem to understand very well

this device that Bach uses.

One notices it perhaps more in the solo violin sonatas

and partitas and in the cello suites,

in which he creates something which seems to be polyphony,

but actually is just as much a single voice.

And so even though technically,

(piano music)

it's actually, of course, as you understand,

(piano music)

in which certain voices are sustained

in order to enrich the texture.

So it's very, very important

that we play this music that way, and you do it.

But I think it's just as important

to call attention to one's virtues,

as to suggest some solutions to,

you know, a few stones and boulders

that may show up in our path.

So that's a very, very good thing.

I'm wondering a little bit about the role of your left hand.

You know, Bach is a great, great fan of walking basses.

No,

what I see.

(piano music)

Sorry, the other way around.

He's playing chess!

He just moved the knight!

And there's the bishop!

And now the pawn is coming right.

If you don't watch out,

the queen's gonna swoop right in, ah!

Oh, E flat major, there we are.

(audience laughs)

The music is always strategic.

And so one needs to see the forest through the trees.

And so I'm not sure that playing

(piano music)

makes it clearer

what is going on strategically in that bass line.

I certainly wouldn't countenance

your playing it staccato, never.

But something...

(piano music)

(hums)

And to this, then, comes the observation that

in music of the 18th century,

and of the Baroque in particular,

one breathes after the first note of the bar

or sometimes the first note of the beat.

The music is almost always upbeat in character.

Are there exceptions?

You bet there are.

(piano music)

But the first one, yes, already the second one

has got a little bit of an upbeat in character.

And then,

(piano music)

then the upbeat character wins.

So that's something I think you can help us with.

And all the way through,

in the performances of each of these three dances,

Mackenzie, my impression was that you were either

involved with the activity of the moment

or, in the case of the courante, were being driven

by a notion of the tempo, which was very fast,

which made it more difficult for us

to see what the game plan is,

to understand the curvature of the piece.

And so in a piece by Bach, of this kind,

also a prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier,

for instance, or

bespoke

cello suites and

violin sonatas and partitas,

in general, the composer first tells you

where you are and who your are.

And as soon as you know that,

he says let's go strolling.

Let's go for adventure.

So we go through the first opening where we have...

(piano music)

Now we know that this is a piece in C minor,

not because he said so,

(piano music)

but because he proved it.

At the beginning, it's a matter of faith.

By the time you get to the end of the second bar,

everybody agrees, okay, it's C minor.

The next thing that's going to happen is

it's going go to the relative major.

If it were in the major key, it would go into the dominant,

but it's going to go from C minor to E flat major.

And for some people who are bred and,

you know, born and raised on Haydn and Mozart

and Beethoven and Schubert, they would say that's it.

So you'd get to here.

(piano music)

See, nobody in this room or watching on the internet

or anybody else would object to that.

It would be perfectly legitimate,

except it's only half the way there.

He goes from here to here, (piano music)

and then to here.

What does that do?

It takes you from C minor in this case

to E flat major to G minor,

which, at the very last moment

(piano music)

becomes G major.

And not, in fact...

(piano music)

Why?

Because it has a double function.

If it's not G major, you can't go back.

(piano music)

So it's got a double face to it.

So if we understand that the music first defines who it is,

then it goes someplace,

then it goes someplace else.

Then before I even hear you play, Mackenzie,

the second half,

I think, he's going to go from point A to point B

and from point B to point C.

And point A is where he started before.

He ended, he went from C to E flat to G.

So he's going to start in G, and he's going to end in C

'cause he started in C.

So, what's going to happen in the middle?

Ah!

We'll wait and see.

We'll find out.

But there is a double kind of symmetry

that operates in these dances,

that one has to make absolutely palpable to the listener.

There is the

musical idea symmetry,

which is replicated exactly in the second half

as it was in the first.

So you start,

(piano music)

and the second half,

slightly upside down, but it's clear that it's the same.

So the events follow themselves melodically in parallel.

But in terms of the tonalities, they're mirror image,

C to G, G to C.

So the coordination between the music,

which is doing this on the one level and this on the other,

is fascinating.

It's especially fascinating

if you can communicate it to the audience

because then the tale you have to tell

becomes fateful and entertaining

and amazing.

Otherwise, it's just agreeable.

Hm?

(piano music)

Now, so I still think, Mackenzie,

you can help me feel that everything you've played,

up to that point, goes to the end,

so that (hums) (piano music)

I hear then, (piano music)

(hums)

ah, now!

Because even then...

(piano music)

I agree, it's not so good.

I just made it up, you know, so it's not so good.

But it's not unbelievable either.

And it's a way of saying that it takes a while

for us to realize what he's actually trying to do,

which is not to take us

through the circle of fifths (piano music)

in C minor,

but actually to take us someplace else.

See, we depend on, you're the tour guide.

If you don't point out the Town Hall

on the left from the tour bus,

I may be talking with my neighbor and miss it completely.

So you need to tell us what we need to know.

(piano music)

Good!

Yeah, you see, there's much more curvature now,

and it becomes much more engrossing.

I noticed that towards the end,

your left hand got progressively more engaged,

and then things got even better.

So really think about this.

(piano music)

Notice that the period of each cell

is sometimes longer and sometimes shorter.

That affects the heart rate of the listeners.

That's a good thing.

Now, you took the first repeat and not the second,

maybe because you were eyeing the time a little bit.

But I believe that in these pieces,

which are binary with repeats,

you should do them all or do none of them.

To be selective and to say, oh, this is a fast one,

so I'll do it twice,

but this is a slow one, so I'll do it only once,

is not such a good idea.

And this is not like a Beethoven sonata

where the second part,

with the development and the recapitulation,

is much larger than the first part with the exposition,

so you could imagine leaving out the second repeat

but not the first one.

I think, in this particular case,

and besides, it gives you an opportunity to decorate,

of which you did a little bit,

but of which you could do much more,

much more.

I'll say something about that

when we reach the sarabande in a few minutes.

Okay, in the courante,

I felt that the driver's seat was the tempo.

It was very hard to hear.

(piano music) (hums)

You know, help me to understand

the shaping of this right hand.

(piano music)

That is so unbelievably better than what you did before.

Do we have agreement in the house?

(audience applauds) You see?

Because you started to engage in storytelling,

you became interested in the plot line

that the succession of tones in the right hand creates.

And then, of course, we become fascinated.

You know, this is the thing,

ladies and gentlemen, about Bach.

We all know he's the greatest.

We all know that no music afterwards

was unaffected by what he did.

People like Mozart and Beethoven, in their old age,

all they could do was emulate Bach.

So you have Opus 106 of Beethoven and Opus 110,

and you've got Opus 101.

You've got the Grosse Fugue.

You've got all of that, and Mozart to 570,

blah, blah, blah, and we have Jupiter Symphony, okay.

We've got all of that.

But go into a student recital,

and look around as the Bach piece gets played.

And people look like this,

and in no time at all...