Dolce Suono's tribute to Julius Baker

For the third Dolce Suono concert of the season, Mimi Stillman arranged an artful tribute to one of the great musicians and teachers of the last 70 years, flutist Julius Baker. When she was eight, Stillman heard a Julius Baker recording and told her mother that was the sound she wanted to develop. She met Baker when she was 11, at a National Flute Association Convention. (You can watch a YouTube video of the two of them playing a duet at a recital Baker presented two months later). She started taking monthly lessons with Baker and entered the Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 12, after Baker suggested she apply.

At Curtis, she studied with Baker and the principal flute of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Jeffrey Khaner. Khaner was a Julius Baker student, too, so she’s directly connected to two generations of a line that includes William Kincaid, the Philadelphia Orchestra flutist who taught most of the great American flute players who arrived on the scene between 1921 and his death in 1967.

Stillman refers to Baker as “like another grandfather” in her notes on the program. “He transformed my life by bringing me to Curtis,” she writes, “and helped me learn and grow and begin my career at a very young age while always caring about my well-being.”

Baker and Bach

Stillman built her tribute around Baker’s association with Bach. Baker was a founding member of the music group that led the American revival of Bach’s cantatas in the late '40s, and his work with Bach’s music was a major facet of a long and varied career. The program could have consisted of several Bach flute works but, as you would expect, the creative spirit at the heart of Dolce Suono reached for something more inventive.

Stillman contacted eight composers who have been associated with Dolce Suono and asked them for short, two- to three-minute pieces “inspired by Bach.” She and Jeffrey Khaner spent the afternoon playing 11 pieces for two flutes. These included two full-length, multi-movement Baroque sonatas by Bach and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel; a lively rondo by the 19th-century Austrian composer Franz Doppler; and eight world premieres created by composers who had been given a license to be clever.

A spirit of invention

Ultra-short pieces are called “inventions” — a term that goes back to the 16th century and suggests novelty and ingenuity. The composers all supplied notes that explained how they modified the rhythm of one of Bach’s themes or engaged in composerly manipulations like inversion, imitation, and harmonic distortion. Bach did that kind of thing, too, and descriptions of artistic technique are always interesting. But you don’t have to study the blueprints to enjoy the product. The first four inventions were composed for two unaccompanied flutes, and you could just sit back and listen to two bright streams of sound braiding and interweaving in interesting, unexpected ways.

The last four inventions added a piano and gained the extra interest provided by Charles Abramovic’s lively touch at the keyboard. Abramovic displayed his versatility, in addition, by shifting between the piano and the harpsichord he played when he accompanied the Baroque sonatas. Cellist Gabriel Cabezas produced the bass line in the Baroque accompaniments and provided a beautiful, evocatively expressive undercurrent.

This was a somewhat intellectual program, but it was packed with lively, sometimes touching music and the creative romp added an engaging element traditionally associated with tributes. Musicians play new works at tributes in the same way scholars and writers publish collections of new papers or new short stories in honor of a distinguished colleague. As Mimi Stillman seems to understand, innovation and novelty are fundamental components of living traditions.