Stein Reveals Bach’s Past in Our Present

We cannot escape J.S. Bach. Churches throughout the Southland offer annual Bach festivals, and in this year of commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Baroque master’s death, Bach programs from specialist groups blow in from the East like the Santa Anas.

But it has taken Leonard Stein--in his annual Piano Spheres recital at the Neighborhood Church of Pasadena on Tuesday, Bach’s 315th birthday--to reveal just how deep Bach’s roots are in Los Angeles.

Stein is our link between past and present. He was Schoenberg’s student and assistant in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and to hear him play the Suite, Opus 25, is indescribably moving. Completed in 1923, it was Schoenberg’s first work entirely in the 12-tone system, a method of thinking about music without key centers that galvanized 20th century music.

The point of Stein’s program, however, was that the suite was an homage to Bach, and that Schoenberg was no different in offering such a radical homage than his greatest musical rival and fellow L.A. emigre, Stravinsky, whose 1924 Sonata was also on the program.

Stein began with the ninth fugue from Bach’s “The Art of the Fugue.” Its polyphonic rigor and rhythmic complexity was a great lesson to Stravinsky, whose back-to-Bach piano style mimics the pinprick attacks of Baroque keyboard music and its florid ornaments.

Schoenberg, on the other hand, loved the chromaticism of Bach and was fond of noting that “The Art of the Fugue” even provided the prototype of the 12-tone row. Unlike Stravinsky, who wrote music that sounded like Bach in modern dress, Schoenberg was more interested in Bach’s inner workings. His suite has the rhythms associated with Baroque dances, but Schoenberg created a thick, complex, fantastically restless piano music for that restless age.

In 1950, Shostakovich paid tribute to Bach as well by writing 24 modern preludes and fugues--and risked Soviet condemnation as a formalist. Stein chose to contrast the luminous, lyrical G-sharp minor prelude and fugue from Bach’s first book of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” with Shostakovich’s noble prelude and frantic fugue in a 5/4 meter in the same key.

The pianist, moreover, had no compunction about moving right up to the present. He made an irresistibly entertaining arrangement of Conlon Nancarrow’s Study No. 9 for player piano, from 1985, for piano six-hands. Stein and two Piano Sphere colleagues, Gloria Cheng and Vicki Ray, sat three in a row at the piano, six hands tapping out six different metrical patterns--the ultimate ramification of Bach’s entangling polyphony.

The most recent works were the second and fourth numbers of “Harrison’s Clock,” five intricate piano pieces written two years ago by Harrison Birtwistle, and dedicated to Los Angeles music patron Betty Freeman and her “walking partner,” Stein. Here shards of chords seem to function in relativistic time as they move at their own speeds. Even in the post-Einsteinian age, we have not exhausted the implications of the way Bach connected independent strands of melody and rhythm.

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And in final proof of that, Stein paid tribute to his own teacher, the remarkable Los Angeles virtuoso Richard Buhlig, who was also in the forefront of the early 20th century Bach revival. As Buhlig regularly did, Stein closed his recital with Bach’s “Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue,” calling it one of the freest works ever written.

At 83, Stein may smudge a rapid passage here and there, but his dry, unfussy style is as refreshing as ever. The way Schoenberg’s suite, in particular, fits his hands--and the utter naturalness of his phrasing--are a revelation. And the tougher and more modern the music, the surer he seemed to be. At the bass end of the keyboard, he was the rock of the Nancarrow; his rhythmic control in the Birtwistle was a thrill.