David Gordon has the ultimate highfalutin’ job title. So highfalutin’ is his job title that it defies ordinary comprehension: Dramaturge for the Carmel Bach Festival. And yet Gordon has no patience for snobbery in the classical music concerts he helps organize. In fact, after talking to him for a few minutes you get the idea that he would be secretly thrilled if festival audiences cut loose, stomped their feet, maybe held up a lighter. Because Bach, Beethoven and the festival’s 20 other featured composers are, after all, the pop stars of their time.
“We need to remember these were commercial composers making a living,” Gordon says. “They were like Andrew Lloyd Webber or Leonard Bernstein, writing to sell tickets to concerts. And our tastes have changed, and now we have this 20th-century ideal of: we have to know how to behave, when to applaud. And that is so lame. So lame! Because in Brahms’ day, if people liked the second movement enough they’d applaud when it was over, and if they applauded long enough, the orchestra would play the second movement again.”
In his position as dramaturge—which can mean a lot of things but in Gordon’s case means the guy who tells the history of the music, translates the lyrics and is all-around spokesman for the festival—Gordon encourages people to approach what my husband calls “powdered wig music” bearing in mind that it was the envelope-pushing jams of its day. Each composer pushed the bounds of acceptability, paving the way for those who followed. A great example of this for newcomers, Gordon says, is the “Spirit Triumphant” concert on the evening of Saturday, July 24 (see www.bachfestival.org for tickets and details), which presents the music of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Barber.
“Bach is the establishment of this beautiful, elegant structure,” explains Gordon, “and Beethoven takes that structure and bends and expands it and loosens it up. And Brahms takes that loosened form and creates something new and rich and warm with it. And then we have a piece by Samuel Barber, who was a neoromantic, very much as deeply emotional as Brahms but 100 years later, and he’s speaking to us more in 20th-century language.”
Gordon pauses. “Any music teacher would flinch at this because it’s such an oversimplification, but I stand by it.”
Another concert Gordon recommends for newbies is the July 26 farewell concert from Elizabeth Wallfisch, the Festival’s longtime concertmaster, or head violinist. She, like music director Bruno Weil, is leaving the Carmel Bach Festival after this year, and Gordon says her unique combination of casual demeanor and world-class talent will be missed.
“She’s a piece of work. She talks onstage, she’s goofy and she’s one of the great violinists in the world,” he says. “So she’s put together a concert of her favorites. I just have a feeling that concert’s going to be very entertaining. Elizabeth Wallfisch is really a trip, in a good sense.”
Clearly the Festival has been working hard to overcome contemporary audiences’ trepidation about embracing the work of Bach. And the Baroque composer, who pre-dates the more familiar and accessible Classical era by decades, can be tough to grasp. A listener can get lost in the twists and turns and endless variations on a theme in Bach’s music, but to Gordon that’s the composer filling the prescribed structure with “the wildest, spaciest stuff. It’s kind of avant-garde in its wildness.”
The ultimate stiff Bach drink is the three-hour St. Matthew Passion, next performed the afternoon of Sunday, July 25. It’s for hardcore Bach lovers and fittingly dedicated to the late Big Sur artist and colorful Bach devotee Emile Norman, who passed away last year.
“He’s been at every Festival I’ve been at,” recalls Gordon, a 22-year veteran of Bach Fest. “He’d be there in his purple sneakers and purple beret. He sat in the same seat in the hall every time, and he grew more and more feeble, but he kept coming. He was a Bach fanatic. He just wanted more Bach.”
