Oregon's Bach Express

By Bob Hicks of The Oregonian.

EUGENE -- They came in ties. They came in tie-dyes. They came in shorts and suits and floppy hats. They came in lumberjack suspenders. They hung from the stairs and catwalks of the Hult Center, leaning over rails, peeking around the great wood pillars that hold up the performance center's slanted roof.

They crushed the place like kids crowding around a fresh deck of Digimon power-booster cards.

Bach was back in town.

Walk the streets of Oregon's second city these days and you'll be forgiven if you start to think you feel an immense, bewigged Baroque presence hovering over your shoulder. Johann Sebastian Bach died in Leipzig in 1750, and his soul, apparently, ascended to Eugene.

The town, caught up in the fever of its 34th annual Oregon Bach Festival, encourages the illusion.

Big poster images of Bach stare at you from sidewalk banners and restaurant windows. His sharp eyes assess you from the walls of malls. His comfortable chins announce his eminence at furniture stores, coffee shops, government offices, bank branches, even bars more accustomed to the canned sounds of heavy metal's dark and angry lords.

But most essentially, Bach's spirit possesses Eugene in its concert halls. And it's an unquenchable spirit -- fertile, joyous, absolutely refusing to play dead. At the Oregon Bach Festival, Bach is our contemporary.

And he is our past.

The most extraordinary thing about this 17-day immersion in great music, which continues through next Sunday, is its transcendence of time. You could feel it in the festival's triumphant opening night performance of George Frideric Handel's rich and all too rarely produced oratorio "Jephtha." Time washed in great loops over the lush curves of the Hult Center's Silva Concert Hall, circling and blending and overlapping: a bloody Old Testament tale, reimagined by a Baroque composer, carried forward to a 21st-century audience.

The meeting of past and present is essential to the spirit of the Oregon Bach Festival, which insists that great music is a living thing. Helmuth Rilling, the festival's artistic director and lead conductor for all of its 34 years, sets Bach squarely within the historical flow of great music. This year's festival also includes Handel, Beethoven and Brahms. It ventures into collaborations with ballet dancers and a tai chi master, Chungliang Al Huang, who will improvise movements while pianist Robert Levin plays the preludes and fugues of "The Well-Tempered Clavier."

And Rilling has often commissioned new work. In 2001 he won a Grammy for his recording with the festival orchestra and chorus of "Credo," a work by contemporary Polish composer Krysztof Penderecki that premiered in Eugene.

But with its emphasis on training young composers and singers, on passing the torch to people who will expand on music's traditions, the Oregon Bach Festival is also a meeting-place of the future. That's partly why all those people were lining the stairs and balconies of the Hult Center lobby two Fridays ago, craning to see the 300-voice children's choir that was sounding the festival's ceremonial opening.

They were here, members of youth choirs from Missouri, Indiana, Mississippi, New Jersey and elsewhere, as part of the Pacific International Children's Choir Festival, a gathering inspired by the Bach Festival and now in its sixth summer.

Exciting the crowd The children's festival is concrete evidence of the Bach Festival's continuing influence on music's future. And the crowd -- parents, siblings, just plain music lovers showing up early before "Jephtha" -- could barely contain its excitement. Television cameras stuck up like islands in an archipelago, scanning, focusing, as the choirs walked in. Boys, girls, tall, short, poised, nervous. Twenty-five, then another row: 50. Up the risers. Twenty-five more. They kept coming. Wings of children at either side. A full 300. A skinny boy in the front row spied his mother and younger brother, just in from Philadelphia. He beamed. The music transported another young singer. Smiling rapturously, she swayed to it, leaned into it, met it like a physical force.

Music is a physical force. More precisely, physical forces create music: the breath that drives a trumpet's sound, the sharp elbow bend and arm-thrust that make a bow scrape string, the bold and gentle gestures of a conductor shaping tone and balance and speed.

Rilling, 70, is a master of such shaping. Working mostly with his Bach ensembles in his native Stuttgart, Germany, but also in Oregon and with such international groups as the Israeli Philharmonic, he records prolifically: It's a tossup whether it's more astonishing that Bach wrote enough music to fill 172 CDs, or that Rilling recorded all 172 of them in a special edition released to critical applause three years ago.

Through all of that experience he's developed a firm set of principles and prejudices about the music, along with a determination to pass his knowledge along. Each year a small group of master conducting students joins the festival to take intensive classes with Rilling and to lead the afternoon performances of Bach's cantatas in the old-fashioned, stately, slightly shopworn Beall Hall on the University of Oregon campus. For ambitious young conductors, it's a plum appointment. "On the West Coast, you just know about this," says Amy Hunn, 30, of Redwood City, Calif. "And my conducting supervisor at Stanford is of the opinion that this is the very best place to learn."

Conducting Bach Rilling, looking trim and sporty with his shock of Andy Warhol hair, is an understated and generous teacher. He's also all business. And the business he conducts with the students gives sharp insights into the way he approaches his own musical work.

Eunice Hae Ock Bang, a university music teacher in Seoul, South Korea, leads the pared-down chorus and five instrumentalists in a section from the early Cantata BWV 131. Perhaps because she's nervous, her work is precise but hesitant.

"You are used to conduct with both hands about the same," Rilling tells her. "The left hand should not give the rhythm. The left hand can be more expressive." Conducting is about keeping time, he tells her, only at its most elementary level. After that, it's about shaping and expression.

And understanding the score and the words. "You understand the text, yes? Do your students understand the text? Very important. It's the key to the music."

Hunn is ebullient on the podium. She smiles. She expresses. She tries to connect with the musicians with her face as well as her hands. And what she's expressing is a joy at being here, making this music.

Which doesn't mean that all runs smoothly.

"In your preparation you have to make a plan, 'Who am I going to lead?' " Rilling advises her. "Search the score in each section for where the important things are happening, and who's doing them."

Hunn is used to signaling musicians with her eyes alone. Is that enough? she asks. Should I use my hands as well?

"You can influence the audience to listen by the way you conduct," Rilling tells her. "If you do this" -- a sharp thrust of the left hand -- "they'll think, 'There must be something important. I wonder what it is?' Your eyes alone cannot do this."

"It's very stressful," Hunn says after the lesson. "But it's terrific." Historic and contemporary While the festival is concentrated on Silva and Beall halls, its tentacles stretch out. Free noon organ concerts take residence in several churches, including one on a northern Baroque-style Brombaugh organ at Central Lutheran Church, designed by Pietro Belluschi in the kind of modern simplicity of line that scales down and paraphrases the grandeur of a Gothic cathedral. Rehearsals scatter around concert halls and the university's rambling music building. For the conducting students and other musicians, there are even tai chi sessions to encourage the kind of mental, physical and spiritual focus that great music demands.

Because this is great music. And Rilling has firm convictions on the way it should sound. He's never jumped on the modern Baroque movement's period-instrument bandwagon, for instance. "I'm against the theory that it has to be done with period instruments," he says. "If we somehow could reconstruct the sound of Bach's time . . . then this would in effect be only half of the job. Because you would also have to reconstruct the man of Bach's time. You would have to hear with the same ear. And that you cannot do."

You can, however, perform historical music through the filter of contemporary life, seeking its essence but accepting that the way we understand its essence changes over time. You can shape the music. And this the Bach Festival does brilliantly.

The Apollonian balances in Handel's "Jephtha" were nuanced, flowing, never rushing. The oratorio's soloists -- James Taylor as Jephtha, Elizabeth Keusch, Anke Vondung, Sanford Sylvan, countertenor Matthew White -- were superb, not just for their technique but for their common purpose with the ensemble.

So, too, with the festival's newest rendition of Bach's Brandenburgs. This is rational music with heart, from an age in search of concord. Things stood out: the lovely tone of harpsichordist Owen Burdick, a little soft spring of sound in the background, like water plashing over stones; trumpeter Guy Few's bright morning jog over the hillocks of Concerto No. 2. But again, it was astonishing how completely the soloists remained a part of the whole.

Then Jeffrey Kahane brought the age of individualism crashing into the party with his bravura performance of Beethoven's Second, Third and Fourth piano concertos, including an impossibly swift descent into the somber thrills of the Third. Yet even in the depths, and in the concertos' mad dashes of speed, Kahane maintained a wonderful elegance.

It wasn't Bach. It was Bach's future -- and our past.

And both joined to make a magnificent present.