“If it’s Wednesday, it must be Bach.” You can almost hear the musicians’ brains holding fast to the mantra as they headed into Day 5 of this year’s Australian Festival of Chamber Music. And true, the two concerts at 5pm and 7:30pm consisted of Bach, Bach, and nothing but Bach, but in typical Piers Lane programming style, there were plenty of surprises in store. As Scotty of the USSS Enterprise might have said: “It’s Bach, Jim, but not as we know it.”
The most interesting experiment topped the 5pm bill – an intriguing re-interpretation of Rheinberger’s 19th-century two piano arrangement of the Goldberg Variations, but this time for the unique combination of harpsichord, piano and accordion. The substantial bouche amuse to this mini marathon was Jayson Gillham with a weighty, strongly dramatised account of the C Minor Toccata, BWV911. Offering a significant – but never excessive – degree of rubato in the dynamic opening, his reading displayed great intent throughout the quieter passages and a beautifully shaped reading of the fugal theme: clean and determined with a spirited ending.
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