A Year of Bach – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Episode 2 of A Year of Bach Podcast features my conversation with the great classical guitarist Jason Vieaux. We talked about the pleasures and sorrows of adapting Bach for guitar, how not to play too big in a recording studio, and the pleasures of live performance.

Jason is hosting a guitar retreat for students of all levels in Benicia, California from October 10 - 12, 2025 — learn more about it here.

My podcast editing AI got a little aggressive on jump cuts! I’m working on getting better at this. As with everything, it’s all harder than it seems to do it right…

Links & references

Jason’s Grammy award winning album Play:

His album Images of Metheny, a desert island disc for me:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kt99hh3nx2Rc2xK1GryK-YLzYu0qiltu4

Jason and Clancy Newman, Live in Philadelphia during COVID:

Fernando Sor’s tricky Etude #1

Ponce’s Sonata Mexicana

And we name-checked a bunch of brilliant guitarists:

David Russell

Julian Bream

Andres Segovia

Christopher Parkening

Zoran Dukic

Lorenzo Micheli

Aniello Desiderio

Kazuhito Yamashita

Marcin Dylla

Colin David

Support & subscribe

* Get the full transcript and future episodes straight to your inbox.

* Subscribe on Apple Music or Spotify

Chapter markers:

02:43 Techniques and Approaches to Playing Bach

12:48 Teaching and Developing Musical Skills

19:25 The Influence of Julian Bream

23:27 The Essence of Musical Intention

25:08 The Challenge of Recording for Commercial Labels

26:33 Recording Techniques and Spaces

32:18 The Pandemic and Performance

34:50 Pop and Jazz Influences

38:46 Upcoming Projects

Intro music: Adagio of BWV 974, performed by your host on his home piano.

Transcript:

[00:00:00]

Evan Goldfine: Hello everyone and welcome to the second episode of the year of Bach Podcast where I talk with people whose lives have been touched by the great master.

Today I'm very grateful to host one of my musical heroes, Jason Vieaux. That's V-I-E-A-U-X, for everyone who should start typing his name into Spotify or Apple Music right now. Jason's widely recognized as one of the world's finest classical guitarists. I've spent hundreds of hours with his recordings. I recommend them all, but my special favorites are his Grammy award-winning album Play, and of course, Images of Metheny where, Jason adapted the tunes of Pat Metheny for classical guitar.

I've also, of course, enjoyed his two albums of Bach, and today we'll be talking about the special thrills and challenges of adapting Bach for guitar. So Jason, thank you so much for joining us here.

Jason Vieaux: it's my pleasure. Thank you, Evan,

for having me.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. So [00:01:00] Bach never wrote specifically for the classical guitar, but his works are touchstones for all of us who have picked up a classical guitar.

I was hoping you could speak to the particular pleasures and sorrows about Bach has adapted for the guitar as we play it today.

Jason Vieaux: There Are definitely challenges of transferring the music to the guitar, not only just in playing the notes themselves, the pitches themselves, but making decisions I try to make it sound as if Bach did have a guitarist next to him, a modern guitarist with this more modern instrument, and how he might have made things sound better. In other words, change either octave displacement or, or even fill in, or in the case of cello works make something that sounded more germane to the classical guitar.

And I think that's a good approach because then you don't get too stuffy or analytical about, well, this isn't what he would do. I jokingly say to my students at Cleveland Institute of Music or Curtis, it's like, well, we can't ask [00:02:00] him 'cause he's dead, so if we could ask him, that'd be great, but we gotta just, you know, have a little faith and press on,

Evan Goldfine: Where do you get stuck when you're trying to do the adaptations and what are those decisions that you have to make?

Jason Vieaux: It's more like, it's more like baseline kind of things usually.

Right, or where you have to decide on an octave displacement, a lot of times you get stuck and then you've gotta work backwards, you gotta go to your destination point where that phrase or that section would finish and then kind of work back.

It's like checking your work and, and, I don't know, trigonometry or something like that, you know, math kind of thing. But that's all right. I mean, that's a fun process because it's satisfying when you come to something that you've figured out that sounds good and you feel like it sounds good and that it's something that you can, perform.

It's always hard, it's always difficult to play. The most difficult thing about playing Bach well on the guitar, in my view is making the polyphony sound effortless. Because that's a [00:03:00] big, that's a big thing for me. Like I've refingered Prelude and Fugue and Allegro 998, since I've. When I first learned it at age 20 in 95 I would've been 21.

Just short of when I did my first recital of it, my graduation recital, I was 21. From there on, I probably changed fingerings on that piece. Over 30 years, about four or five times, four or five go rounds. 'cause I, I tend to rotate them in and out of the solo program. I'll play 'em for three years, then I put 'em away for five or seven or something.

Then I bring 'em back mainly because I'm learning other ones and then I want those, or if it's for a record. It's those, periods when you're away that are nice because you're learning new. Things from the stuff that you're adapting from violin or cello or whatever it might be.

I've not really attempted a keyboard one to date. But then you come back to say Prelude and Fugue Allegro or. The third Lute suite [00:04:00] and you have fresher ears, more experience, and that part is very satisfying.

Evan Goldfine: Have you found some of those interpretations to have changed when you came back?

Yeah. Three or five years later. What happens?

Jason Vieaux: Sometimes the tempos get faster, sometimes they get slower. Sometimes they, to some, if they get a little slower, it's again to accommodate more up stem, down stem kind of things. Like things in the, in, you know, that are in the top line that are you start to hear more as, two line type of, things.

And then I want to refinger some of that stuff across two strings to bring that out. You know, just things like that I would've missed when I was in my early twenties,

Evan Goldfine: that's interesting 'cause I find you're playing to be especially orchestral, you know, Segovia describes the guitar as an orchestral instrument.

I think part of that is being able to foreground and background the melodies with the accompaniment. 'cause you're trying to do a number of things with Bach especially are, do you have tricks to keep the contrapuntal lines [00:05:00] clear given the mechanical limitations of the instrument?

Jason Vieaux: Well, one of the things I do more often, this is really an oversimplification of it, is I don't do the thing that I think my best colleagues at the time, say 30 years ago, or where you push, you push your fugue subject line way out in front. Mm-hmm. Like an almost like an 80 20 ratio to the other voices. I like doing now more of a 60 40 if you have the touch to do it because. It's like everything, everything is melody.

So even though maybe a tenor line is not as interesting as, not as the now alto line that is now getting a spotlight for two measures, I don't, I'm not a big fan of subjugating the other lines for the purpose of really pushing this one line out way out in front. So I might give a spotlight to something that I think is particularly melodic, but generally I, I think.

When you, when you do listen to, you know, good performances [00:06:00] of, of Bach or like the orchestral the actual orchestral pieces, Brandenburg concertos and this kind of thing, there's more of like an even mix generally, uh, to the various instruments, the ensemble and that. And so I've always had a, I've always had a kind of a orchestrally minded or group, group of musicians minded type of approach to it. So I guess that's one of the things I think that, that have maybe changed a little bit, or deepened.

Evan Goldfine: I know you, you've been thinking about guitar for pretty much your entire life, but for most of us who are amateurs or less, the idea of moving from 80 20 with, certain melody lines to 60 40 seems like a superhuman achievement because for people who don't play guitar, that could mean, different fingers at different sort of plucking ratios. Yes. And also some left-handed techniques also about how you're gonna be articulating in the left hand.

Jason Vieaux: That's right. Could you talk

Evan Goldfine: a little bit about get, get real nerdy about this?

Yeah. Do you even think about it or is it [00:07:00] natural? How does that work?

Jason Vieaux: I don't have to think about it as much because I mean, uh, to be I, this, I mean I've performed probably somewhere between, at this point, after 32 years professionally, I. Probably 50 to 70 hours of different music. So after a while you're not, it's all that kind of stuff becomes much more instinctive.

But I will say that over the past 15 years, I definitely employ a lot more left hand damping or articulation. Or articulation if I wanna articulate. Say a fugue subject. I'll do a lot more of that with my left hand now than I did with my right hand, say 25 years ago. Because my left hand is just more developed and a lot of why it's more developed is specific challenges in those, dozens of hours of, of music, whether it be avant garde stuff where a composer's asking you to do something that you basically have [00:08:00] never really done before on the instrument or the various textures and things that are in romantic era pieces. Classical era, especially Fernando, but in particular Fernando Sor. Left hand is super, super important in, in Fernando Sors music in general because it's so highly detailed in, its in its polyphony.

He's really often you can almost kind of hear like he's writing for string quartet in a lot of these pieces. Even the so-called simple etudes, which are really not so simple and, and not particularly easy, to play. Sor is a great education in how to voice things on the guitar.

There's a lot.

Evan Goldfine: I love playing through the Sor etudes just because they look really simple like the c and c chord in the first position. Yeah. But you can spend your whole life trying to get it exactly right.

Jason Vieaux: That's right. Like Segovia one, which is, I'm forgetting the opus number right now, but it was in Segovia's collection.

It was number one. It's the three voice chorale in C major. Like that is [00:09:00] not a picnic. And it's, it just always used to crack me up. You know, when I first started teaching. When students would say they studied with, someone or whatever, and that was the first thing they handed them. I was like, well, this, and, and they're like, and they couldn't understand why they've been working with it for five years, 10 years, or this was years ago and I did it and I still can't play it.

I'm like, you realize this is like a very, very difficult piece of music to play. Yeah. And then we're like, really? But it's number one in the Segovia, handpicked etudes, Sor, etudes. And it's an etude, so it should be easy. Right? It's like, no. Sor struggled a lot his whole life with quote unquote dumbing down, right?

The difficulty level of finally, by the end, he started to get it right, like OP 60, the progressive studies, that set of progressive studies, he finally started to, you know, kind of go, oh, wait a minute. And they're not. So I have to come down to their level in order to, [00:10:00] you know, to get them started. But it's nowadays we have like from unlimited, you know, really good, you know, training Etudes, Brouwer for example, was just really kind of the modern.

It's the most obvious example of the 20th century, but since then, you know now really lots of guitar star writing really good things that really help train a first year student, second year student, third, and so on and so forth.

Evan Goldfine: And they're musical, right?

Jason Vieaux: And they're musical.

Evan Goldfine: Exactly. Yeah. Some of the pianos exercise, I, I went back to start playing piano again after many, many years.

And to start at the beginning is pretty brutal. I, I'm, I'm trying to do what I did at this, the time in the beginning where I was learning guitar is try to play the pieces that I like and start from there. And it's a real motivator. Yeah. Uh, for me.

I'd like to go back to Bach and thinking about how, you're thinking about these performances again over the years. When you're approaching one of these piece, are you coming at it like thinking, I have a predisposed idea for what tempo and emotivity [00:11:00] and dynamics are trying to be. Are you feeling it in the moment when you get to the recording studio? Do you have a particular idea? How do you come up with your interpretations? Because I, I think they probably develop over time.

How does that work internally for you? I, I, this is might be a challenging question.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. It's, it's a challenging question, but it's, I mean, the, it's really simple actually, to answer. I'd never come in with any preconceived notions about anything. When I start a piece of music, I don't have a concept.

I don't, I don't assign anything. My whole thing this whole time is really with, whether it's Ponce, sonatas, or. Transcriptions and arranging is a different animal obviously, but, but say playing, like making the Ponce Sonatas record 25 years ago, or the Albert Albeniz transcriptions even.

I just try to play what's there. I don't really try to do anything I, and that I just make the decisions along the way according to my skill level [00:12:00] and. I think the main kind of thing is, is it, does it sound good? Like my ear? I'm, I, I think if there's anything that I'm good at, it's listening to what my playing is outside of myself.

Like I'm, I'm, that's if if it's the only thing I, if there's one thing I'm good at, it's that like I can, I have a good sense of the performance aspect of what I'm eventually gonna do. I'm not there yet when I start. Right. But I have a good sense of what I want to have happen and how that's going to sound coming out of my instrument in a space, in a live space, which is why live is the best way to hear me actually, despite, I think the recordings are nice, they're fine, but like, really the live, live is really the way to hear me. I would say personally,

Evan Goldfine: I still recommend everybody queue up the Play album, which is just so wonderful. How do you inculcate that kind of skill in your students to be able to listen to yourself [00:13:00] outside of yourself? I think we all have to listen to ourselves speaking outside of ourselves.

Well, yeah. In the world. But how do you do that for musicians?

Jason Vieaux: Well recording, continually telling them to record themselves and, and even if it's not on the best equipment, but just recording early run throughs. Even snippets. It can even just be a section of a piece. If that's ready to go, go ahead and do a run through of it, and play back and listen back so that you're seeing yourself in a, in a kind of a sonic mirror. That's the best way to develop that, that sense. I mean, I had a good fortune of in, in growing up in Buffalo, of playing a pretty fair amount of recitals for a kid. I mean, starting with a full first, full length one at 12.

And in those days, just that we just, someone sort of slapped up a audio recording of it and having it on a cassette tape and listening to it. And then within a year, the local classical radio station, WNED, was [00:14:00] featuring me on something. I'd come into the studio and play something and they go, okay,

we're gonna play this on da da da on this date, and then you and your parents and would tune in to listen. And that's very exciting to hear yourself on the radio, but that's also the sensation of hearing yourself through the radio. It's all this, this, that kind of process. I had a good early education in that.

So, yeah. Um, I think that's a great way for students to develop that sense of being kind of being pretty critical actually of what, what you're hearing. I mean, you can enjoy it and at the same time be of two minds. You can enjoy the accomplishment aspect of it, but okay, now what's next?

What, what? How, how can this, where, what area do I, of the, 200 areas that there are to work on in music, which, you know, what areas do I try to improve in that?

Evan Goldfine: Most lay people don't like to listen to themselves speak. Do you have that experience as a musician or with your students listening back to what you've played and being like, ah, darn it.

Or just, I wish it were [00:15:00] better.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. It's, it's kind of a lukewarm response from me. It's kind of like, well, that could have, that could have been better. But, you know, every, every time you're making a record, you're really under sort of like some these kind of time constraints that they're, and they're not really conducive to a hyper busy schedule where you're traveling two thirds of every year and then you gotta find a date to slam in, two Bach suites or something, and then you come back another time and then you're working on those in a hotel room after, sometimes after a concert. I mean, I used to do that kind of stuff sometimes with like a couple glasses of wine after the concert. Like, you know, just kind of like, oh my God, I gotta get this, I can't do that anymore. Yeah. I just,

Evan Goldfine: It's an age thing.

Jason Vieaux: It's just an age thing. And I value sleep above everything else, including practice. Actually, I, as you get older, sleepy actually becomes number one and practice number two. Whereas when you're in twenties and thirties, practice is number one and sleep is number two or three or five or whatever, you know?

Evan Goldfine: I [00:16:00] hear you.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. So it's kind of like you get it in when you can and then you listen to the result and you're like, well, I do that better.

I do that passage better now, but there's, there's probably, it would've been unrealistic to expect that I would play it the way I did then. Then.

Evan Goldfine: Sure.

Jason Vieaux: That I play now after what, 50 performances of that piece. It's of course. It's gonna get. Better and better and deeper and deep. You know, it's gonna become more and more high definition, of course, as you perform it in front of people.

Evan Goldfine: What's that moment?

Jason Vieaux: Let's just, I should just add that half of what you hear on my records, I learned for the records like Bach volume two. Here's a copy of right here, line two. I have it. I have one in here. Yeah, I never did Lute suite number four. I learned that. For the record. So I play the prelude a little faster now because I've now played in about 10 to 15 recitals only starting this time last year.

Evan Goldfine (2): Yeah,

Jason Vieaux: it was when I finally started playing fourth Lute suite. Third Sonata haven't played live yet. Sonata [00:17:00] one played it for since 1999.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. And how does it feel to get more high definition from going from the initial engagement with a piece where you can play it with facility and it sounds okay.

Jason Vieaux: Mm-hmm.

Evan Goldfine: To going high def, what does that. Look like to you? How did the performances at the end differ?

Jason Vieaux: It was awesome. It was awesome. Because you're moving forward, you're not moving backwards and you're not standing still 'cause you're moving. You're just it's moving. The thing is moving forward. Yeah.

And it's great. Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: And the deepening, you get more connected to something when you keep going.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah, yeah, for sure. One of those things that's hard. I played Ponce, Sonata, Mexicana last weekend, and two weekends before that. Those two performances were the first time I'd done that piece in 10 years.

And, and the, the previous 10 years of life experience and musical experience that went, that went into just prepping them and getting 'em ready to play in front of other [00:18:00] humans was like amazing. Like it's just so much deeper. It's just so much more real, then, and that's why the, that's why I try to tell my students that are making recordings and stuff like that, just remember that this is a snapshot.

This is like a photograph of you. Like as a, pimply, 14-year-old or whatever, right now you're gonna look back on this in just two years and go, oh my God, I play that. So I look so much better now. Right. We relate that to sound it's all really about growth.

Evan Goldfine: I wonder how to explain that to people. 'cause I've, you know, you live with maybe some, the way that people engage with certain pop music they loved, like, you know, how does the first Pearl Jam album feel to you now versus when it came out when you were a kid or you know, speaking I listen to Bach differently now than I did when I got the first Segovia guitar record. I was like, what is this? It like kind of knocked me back. Oh. Just getting deeper and deeper into it enriches it and all of us as listeners, if you can listen deeply, it's another layer deeper when you're [00:19:00] actually playing it.

And that's a sort of pleasure that's reserved for musicians. I. Right. And maybe actors too.

Jason Vieaux: Oh, I think so. For actors, I think for anybody in the arts. And, but in general, I think that's the, is the thing is because it's, it's quite normal and should be expected that you, well, one, this is kind of a two part answer.

One well, one that early on, if you're doing anything right, you probably should be rejecting. Some of the, previous things that you, thought were great, like, I had to get away from Bream. Honestly, when I, my teacher suggested John Holmquist when I got to college I was 17.

And, he wasn't just him like, Carlos Barbosa-Lima Alice Artzt, David Russell, they heard a lot of Bream influence in my playing, and that was purely from records. 'Cause that was my guy, right? Like of, you know, between Segovia and Parkening. I [00:20:00] loved the Parkening recordings that we had too, especially in the Spanish style.

My dad and I wore that out. But Bream consistently excited me as a listener, right? And so much so that I wasn't actively trying to, I wasn't never actively, actively trying to copy his style. I never, that never even entered my mind. It just. I just took on some of those kind of things 'cause I was 13, you know, 12, 13, 14 years old, so a couple of people mentioned in masterclasses you like when I play, you know, Choros number one, like boy this really sounds like you sound a bit like Bream or whatever. When I, when I play it or whatever. And I'm glad they mentioned it at the time. Of course. It was shocking to me to hear that right.

And then my teacher, like I said, when John Holmquist at Cleveland Institute of Music, where I taught now for 27 years, he basically made, he basically suggested that I not listen to those [00:21:00] records, you know, or to his records to get away from that because it was time to start, first of all, listening to other players, even those that I might not immediately like right away.

That was the key thing too. Because when you're young, you immediately judge something and you toss it or you own it, you know, like you love it and it's, there's not a lot of in-between. More like extremes that way, and then you learn to appreciate things and you start taking, bits and pieces.

You're not actively working 'em into your interpretation. They're more like, they percolates slowly or they sort of steep like, like a, like tea or something like that. They kind of, they steep very slowly over time and I think those influences then become more rich, more richer. And then when you listen to Bream, you either reject that or listen with fresh ears

but that was all over with by the time I was in my late twenties. That Was the direct result of touring

Evan Goldfine: because you got different feedback from the audiences [00:22:00] that let you go

Jason Vieaux: through. I, wasn't the feedback from the audiences. I've always been able to please audiences, but I never really cared that much about what they thought.

Evan Goldfine: Oh, wonderful.

Jason Vieaux: I take my pleasures now as I did then. From the fact that they didn't throw tomatoes at me and they seemed to enjoy it. They called me back for an encore or two. They, or they stood up, you know, when they stand up, that means they really liked it, you know, or what, you know, stuff like that.

And that's about the furthest I ever thought about. I never I dig. I was telling students this last week at this festival in Connecticut, 'cause they asked me these same questions and I said I wanna get to, I just wanna be in a place where I am digging, like I'm a member of the audience and I'm listening to this guy play.

And I go, I am digging everything that that person is doing. That's the way I want to, that guy is the way that I wanna play. But you're the one doing it. That's a great, that's a very good place to be. I know that sounds egotistical, but it's not. Because that's what [00:23:00] we're all actually trying to get to you're answering to nobody really after a while, but yourself.

And that should take place if you're a proper musician. Like you should have that voice, that inner guide, that inner compass should be firing by the time you're in your late twenties, early thirties. For sure. Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: Can we go back to Bream for a moment?

Jason Vieaux: Sure. Yeah. Why not?

Evan Goldfine: I love Julian Bream.

Jason Vieaux: Oh, yeah.

Evan Goldfine: For these listeners who don't know Julian Bream, go listen to a lot of Julian Bream. For me, the genius of Bream is that it feels like every note is so perfectly placed. It is just so songlike and lyrical at every moment. And I, I hear that still in your playing, that those aspects, at least

Jason Vieaux: that's

Evan Goldfine: so what does that work

Jason Vieaux: He had a natural intention behind every note. He's not second guessing anything. There's no, that's what it sounds like. It sounds, it's the it's, it sounds like somebody who gives zero Fs. About what I think about what [00:24:00] you think and about what the audience thinks. I love it.

And when I listen to that today that's what I hear. It's full one. It's like it's close to 100% intention. There's no hesitation. He says what he, he's he means what he says. He says what he means. That's the kind of people I like to listen to and I don't, you can take two guitarists and they're wildly different, but marans like that.

Marcin Dylla is like one of my favorite players of all time, Zoran Dukic, you know, it can be different every time, especially with Zoran. But like, those are just two examples. Lorenzo Micheli, holy cow, that's something like, it's just all, they're inside of the music and you can tell they're not playing....

they're playing for your enjoyment. But they would play that way. Whether you and I were there or not. I love it.

Evan Goldfine: And none of these guys are particularly showy players either. Do you know the Japanese guitarist? Kazuhito Yamashita.

Jason Vieaux: Oh God. Unbelievable.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah, like chops to, [00:25:00] from here to eternity. But I don't find his records particularly pleasing. There's too much. Going on.

Jason Vieaux: He's better, he seemed more convincing Live, right? Is is, let's say that on records, right? I think I'm more convincing live than on records. So too, because the thing about making records is you gotta get, you gotta make records.

They're commercial records. If you're recording for a commercial label, like there is, I'll be honest, I mean, I know a lot of people don't wanna hear this, but you can't blast away like you're on stage playing to a thousand people at Kaufman Hall in New York City. Like, you can't play that way.

The mics are 10 feet, eight to 10 feet from you. They're gonna sound, it's gonna be like, eh, God, why? Why is this person screaming at me on a recording? And it's gonna sound like, like, okay, okay. It's like all caps. It's gonna sound like all caps, right? They gotta get reigned in. Someone with a big sound.

I have a big sound like Zoran got a big sound Aniello Desiderio , big sound, [00:26:00] Kazuhito, like massive personality through the thing. My, knowing what I know about making commercial records, they probably had to reign and they probably had to kind of rein him in a little bit. Or else all you'd hear was all this rattling of bass strings and, and just the detritus that's coming off of that right hand.

From like, he's like a John Daly. Like, yeah, John Daly was the golf, right? He's just swinging for the fences. Like there's no, there's no halfway with that guy. Right? So it's, it's kind of like, so those players sometimes don't translate on record. They may, they translate better live. And I think to a lesser extent, I, I do that as well.

I try to bridge. Those two things as best I can, but honestly, when you're like, I had to really learn how to create the sound of something that's loud on an open E string or D string without actually playing loud. Because if you play loud, the thing's gonna rattle.

Evan Goldfine: How do you do that?

Jason Vieaux: Uh, you play thin you, you thin out your tone [00:27:00] angle.

You don't play with your rich David Russell, sort of, sweet, dark, chocolatey tone, you know, angle, you know, you play straight across the string for that one note, right? And maybe a little bit more toward the bridge than you want to play. You gotta do these little tricks like that to keep Oh yeah.

Evan Goldfine: That kind of keeps the tone inside a little

bit.

Jason Vieaux: Keep it, to keep it clean. You gotta make a clean recording for radio because the record company's trying to get that stuff on the radio.

Evan Goldfine: The loudest record. I'm thinking about Your repertoire might be the Metheny album.

Um, not Images of Metheny, the one of his. Oh. He wrote for you to play right, that has some really big guitar. Sounds an absolutely amazing achievement of an album. I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit.

Jason Vieaux: that's not my producer, obviously. That's Pat producing.

Evan Goldfine: Right?

Jason Vieaux: So he, I

Evan Goldfine: He wanted that big, big sound.

Jason Vieaux: You want I by, if we're gonna make a comparison, he, the classical way of the, the more traditional classical thing of, of recording a guitar [00:28:00] is like I'd said like our, our guys, you know, like Alan does something between, I'm gonna give a really rough estimate, but like seven to 10 feet from the thing, and then he may put a couple mics in the back of the space to pick up ambiance so you get spatial depth. So it sounds like I'm playing in a nice, nice small concert hall. We have a wonderful space now to record it. Not that church that Play in everything before was, that was overly reverberate.

I never loved that place. I liked it, but I always thought that those were overly reverberate. The space that we have now that you hear on volume two and the next record coming up this fall. That's coming out is in this newer space and also the Escher String Quartet record is done in the new space.

It's in Indiana. Anything from 16 after that, Pat's approach of course is a bit different, right? It's a little bit more closer to the way he records things in general. I don't mean to speak for Pat because he know, I mean, I'm, I probably know just a [00:29:00] sliver of what he knows about recording a guitar or production or anything like that.

But it's closer. It's like you're more like inside the guitar.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Jason Vieaux: So there are classical guitar recordings like that, but I like that kind of little bit of space between the mics and the guitar to get the sense that it's kind of nice to hear a guitar, like you're sitting in the fifth row of like of like a small, like a good concert hall that holds like the one that's good for guitar, one that holds like 300 seats type of, yeah. Yeah, but it's like with terrific acoustics that's the kind of thing we've got now. It's amazing

Evan Goldfine: when you first play start that Pat album, the Four Paths of Light,

it feels like, it's like that, it blows your head back, like in the very first string, uh, for the first moments. It's so exciting. And also very different from a lot of the other, uh,

Jason Vieaux: and that's exactly what he wanted. He had me playing with strokes with my right hand. I was playing them with my arm, so I was going, like, I was, I was basically using elbow joint and stuff, like it [00:30:00] was never loud enough for him.

He's like, can you, can you even me more? He is like, he said, he goes at one point, he's like. All right. That's good. That's good. But like, don't, he said Don't be afraid. I know. I get it. You guys like, you guys being classical guitars, like these guys, you guys are very careful about overplaying the string, right?

And, and rallying. He's like rattle away. He's like, I want you to get in touch with your inner Pantera is nice.

It's fun on the first movement, right?

Evan Goldfine: On the first, right? No, it's huge. It's huge. Very cool. You've recorded some of these works of Bach for guitar. Not, not all of them.

The biggest, most famous one is the D minor violin sonata the famous Chaconne.

Jason Vieaux: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Evan Goldfine: What are your feelings about that piece as it's arranged for guitar? Is that something that is on your mountaintop? Are you waiting to do that one? What do you feel?

Jason Vieaux: Yeah, it's not so much of a mountaintop thing, I guess.

I mean, in some ways I've always, I, I play, I played, I learned the Chaconne in high school. I've been basically [00:31:00] working on it with students for, I don't know, 32 years really, or, or 30 years or something like that. I mean, I've been at CIM for 27, 28, Curtis for 13, 14, 14 now. And so, especially, particularly at Curtis, I'm working on Chaconne like every year with someone all through the whole school year, so.

There's so many different transcriptions of it. And at this point I would almost rather if I had an AI type of brain, like I could process it in my brain. I'd rather have AI just cherry pick what my proclivities would decide are the best, you know, kind of ways of doing it rather than have to do the work myself.

But eventually I'm gonna have to do the work myself if I do it. And that is a future recording that I like to do. Yeah. In the way that volume two completed. D Lute works by doing the fourth Lute suite, which is even, we call it a violin works cd. Of course it's the third partita, right?

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Jason Vieaux: By eventually [00:32:00] completing The Sonatas by doing the second sonata, that would make a record right there.

Second Sonata and second partita done. 60 minutes.

Evan Goldfine: Well, I'm glad we've decided together.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. Eventually I'd like to. I'd like to get to that. Uh, my playing is really getting pretty strong right now. I mean, it's in a really good place.

Evan Goldfine: Does it feel like you're like climbing another step?

Jason Vieaux: I'm

actually kind of making another, well, the pandemic is really kind, I have to say, it really kind of took a chunk outta me. It took the wind outta my sails. 'cause I was, I, I was such an trained animal by my profession that when I didn't have.

You know, initially anything to really prepare for. And then even then, like when people were starting to piece things together through virtual concerts, like the virtual experience, for me personally, just didn't really Yeah. Do

Evan Goldfine: many of us.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. Because that's what we all learned, right? As humans.

That there's something about [00:33:00] the all of us in a room, in a space together. And there's an energy there. And that's a thing. That's a real thing. I think that's what we really discovered. So like a lot of these more tech-minded people at the time that were writing articles, a million things came out on your media outlets or whatever came out on your phone. Oh, and this, you know, people are gonna, this is gonna change things forever. 'cause then when, when the pandemic's over, people are gonna continue to do this at home. And I was like, that doesn't that doesn't sound right at all.

You're really gonna go. You know, see Metallica or Coldplay or whatever, or, or whatever pick Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: On your screen.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. Oasis or whatever. You're really gonna go see Oasis on your screen if you have the money and time, to go see him at a stadium, please.

Evan Goldfine: Jason, you had a pandemic at a concert with a cellist named Clancy Newman from Philadelphia.

Jason Vieaux: That's a good one.

Evan Goldfine: That concert is amazing, including the. Cello and Guitar Sonata by [00:34:00] Radames Gnattali.

Jason Vieaux: Oh yeah. I love that piece. I play that a lot.

Evan Goldfine: Such a cool, that's the first time I heard it when I heard that streamed, and it is just a gem of a piece. It's my and I went down the rabbit hole listening to other recordings, and that live recording is, I think, the finest recording of that piece.

Jason Vieaux: Oh, thanks. Yeah, that was a good, that was a good, I was starting to get a little bit more used to the thing, the thing, 'cause it felt like you had to learn how to perform in a way all over again when you're when it's virtual. But then that they allowed by that point. They had allowed, uh, 30 people that were distanced in the hall.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Jason Vieaux: So that was nothing.

Evan Goldfine: At least

there were some people there. Right. They probably changed it. That was it. You got the

energy.

Jason Vieaux: Oh, yeah. If there was five people that would've changed it for me. That was, that's the whole thing. I mean, it's like, if there's one person in front of me and they're there.

I mean, my dad told me that when I was a kid. You gotta play to that person. Like you're playing to a thousand people.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Jason Vieaux: Yeah. Right. Well,

Evan Goldfine: thank you so much for taking the time to chat today. There's one, question I wanna end with, so I wanna [00:35:00] switch to gears about another band that we both love.

In the immediate aftermath of the death of Steely Dan's Walter Becker, you posted, attributed to him a video arranging a bunch of Steely Dan tunes. It sounded thrown together, but what I am requesting is Steely Dan cover album in the same way that you did the Metheny cover album. And what do you think about that?

Jason Vieaux: I do. I do think that, and my producer, uh, also, has, that's a possible record that's on the table, like the works of, Fagen and Becker and stuff like that. That would be a very easy record to, honestly, like I've, I've arranged so much pop music and jazz material for the guitar by this point.

A lot of it off the cuff on request. Yeah. You know, like I've done it at festivals with, for a friend or something like that, you know, like a Stone Temple Pilots song or whatever. Right. But for my boss at CIM I did an arrangement of Limelight, by rush or whatever. Just because, just because they, it was, that was like the request.

That was meant as a medley and that happened like the, I think I put that up the day after.

[00:36:00] Or something?

Evan Goldfine: Something and it in the immediate aftermath..

Jason Vieaux: I remember having to practice it at home and I actually asked my wife and my kids were really quite small then I was like, could, if could you put them to bed? And then I, because I'm gonna need a couple hours to kind of run it down. And then I took several takes and that was the cleanest one. And it was like 2:00 AM and I'm like, all right, that's going out. That have to be it. But I listened to that back again.

I was like, that's a lot. I mean, that's, that's a lot to do. In one afternoon,

Evan Goldfine: i, I think you have a lot of people listening to that one. I, I'd love to hear more of your pop covers. It's not easy to do, and I think I, I'll close by saying that your sensibility with pop and jazz informs the composed stuff that you're interpreting that kind of, uh, ear for different styles of rhythm and um, and integration of harmony and dance helps everything.

Jason Vieaux: And it does.

Evan Goldfine: You really hear in the music.

Jason Vieaux: It does. In the nineties and stuff when, you know, sort of the coming in age years, some, some [00:37:00] people, musicians in a given community would say, well, don't you feel that might prohibit, your experience or learning with, of like say Bach 'cause you also play a lot of Bach and whatever.

Do you feel like this kind of works its way into this or the other thing? It's never felt like one encroached on the other, that one suspended the other or anything like that. Like I've never, and also when it comes to say this idea of crossover, I think you've probably noticed, 'cause you seem to know my catalog really well and li and live performances and stuff on, on YouTube from radio stations and whatnot.

I've never had a desire to cross hybridize to say Rock up Bach? No. Or Bach up? No, no. Or Bach up Rock? No. Like, always sounded, it's always cheesy. Sounded cheesy to me. And it, it was never really convincing. If I now. It's different if I do. What a wonderful world that has like a dash of Joni Mitchell and a pinch of like [00:38:00] Brazilian That's what pop music is really good at doing is you can, I. You can sort of, you can spin the thing into another thing, but a piece by, but something like by Bach or whatever, or like, I just can't, it's just like it doesn't need anything else to me.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. There have been some people in my listening over the course of the year, people have said, you should listen to this.

I've listened to Jacques Loussier Trio who did like these jazzed up versions of the classics. Oh, not great. Yeah, not great. And then, I'm trying to remember, there were a couple others. The s Swingle sisters or the Oh, the

Jason Vieaux: Swingle singers. My dad had

Evan Goldfine: singer. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Vieaux: Do bottom, it's like, yeah. Okay. I mean, they look.

Evan Goldfine: If it gets

people into it, fine. Right. Like if it gets people interested, but that's not, uh, those are more novelty acts and that's not what we're going for here. All right, Jason, well thank you again. What's your third album? What's volume three looking like for the fall?

Jason Vieaux: Well, volume three would be after the one that's coming up in the fall. It's actually all [00:39:00] my compositions, all my,

Evan Goldfine: oh, wow.

Jason Vieaux: All like, um, mostly like, uh, intermediate, etude kind of things for students, but then some sort of con pieces you can play in concert.

They're, they're perfectly harmless. They're mostly kind of like Americana sort of influence type of things. But I've been playing, I played one this last, these last two cities the new one called Tidal Pools for the first time. And it's gotten great response from it.

And Home is a tremolo piece and there's a couple really great guitarists that are playing 'em now. Colin Davin and Bo Kyung Byun. She's a GFA winner. So people are already starting to play that, which is wild. So

Evan Goldfine: yeah, who knows? Just

Jason Vieaux: the

Evan Goldfine: world. Alright, well Jason, thank you again. Uh, I'll put some links in the description to get everybody to click on all this wonderful music you've, uh, made and shared with us today.

Thank you again.

Jason Vieaux: Thanks, Evan.

Episode 1 of the Year of Bach Podcast features Henry Oliver, author of the Substack The Common Reader, and the excellent book Second Act, a study of late bloomers in business and the arts.

Our open-ended conversation touches on Bach, Shakespeare, late blooming, and the pleasures and problems of Glenn Gould. Henry describes the “expectation of astonishment” in music and literature, and names his favorite recordings.

Links & references

* Henry’s Substack – The Common Reader

* Henry’s post on his favorite Bach pieces.

* The Second Act (Amazon)

* Selected recordings, with YouTube links:

* Henry’s favorite: Gould playing the Sinfonias live in Moscow

* My cantata gateway album: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing “Ich Habe Genug”

* My ‘dark horse’ record: Peter Schreier (tenor) and Karl Richter (organ) perform BWV 487 - “Mein Jesu, was für Seelenweh”

Support & subscribe

* Get the full transcript and future episodes straight to your inbox:

* Please share the show and rate it!

Intro music: Adagio of BWV 974, performed by your host on his home piano.

Transcript:

The Expectation of Astonishment: Henry Oliver on Bach and the Hunger for Seriousness

Evan Goldfine: Welcome everyone to the premiere episode of the Year of Bach podcast.

This series features a set of conversations with artists and writers who have a deep and personal connection to the music of J.S. Bach and how this music inspires and moves them throughout their lifetimes. Today my guest is Henry Oliver. I. Author of the recent bestseller, the Second Act, a Study of Late Bloomers in Business and the Arts.

He also writes the excellent Substack, the Common Reader, where he advocates for people to read the great classics of literature with a special emphasis on the works of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. He's also a great fan of Bach and a supporter of my substack from its earliest days, and I'm glad to have a readership that overlaps so strongly with his.

So, Henry, thank you for being my first guest, and I'm excited to talk to you about Bach today.

Henry Oliver: Oh, I'm delighted. This is, this is gonna be one of my favorite podcasts.

Evan Goldfine: You're setting me up. Okay. So Henry, why do you keep returning to Bach [00:01:00] throughout your lifetime?

Henry Oliver: Oh, because the best, the human, the human spirit loves what is best.

We love beauty, we love excellence. We love virtue. Bach embodies all of these things. You can hum him. You can have raptures about him. He can be fun, he can be serious. He’s the Shakespeare of music, right.

Evan Goldfine: Clearly. Do you, do you find it to be a more intellectual or emotional experience or both?

Henry Oliver: , more emotional. I think maybe that's because I don't understand music to, to a great degree, but I feel that Bach is able to find deep expressions of human feeling. I prefer the word feeling than emotion, deep expressions of human feeling and very subtle expressions of those things. So I think one reason why the cello suites are so, so universally popular is because they give [00:02:00] voice to a set of moods that have not really been expressed quite in that level of finery before or maybe since.

Evan Goldfine: Is there something there also about it being solo pieces along with the violin sonatas also That particularly triggers that emotional core for you.

Henry Oliver: I suppose so. I love the cello. I think that's probably the heart of it. And I think, again, they are some of his best works and, we respond, we do respond to excellence.

I believe that very strongly.

Evan Goldfine: Do you like the cello and piano sonatas?

Henry Oliver: I don't love them as much. I must confess. Martha Argerich is good at those, right?

Evan Goldfine: I, I have that album.

That's the one I know. You just pick her over everybody. That's easy. She's threatening to come to New York in a couple years, but we'll see.

Henry Oliver: Every time I listen to it, I'm not left feeling I want to go back.

Evan Goldfine: Wow. Yeah.

Henry Oliver: Yeah. That's the,

Evan Goldfine: [00:03:00] yeah, that's, it's disappointing because you want it to be also the best, but we can't have the best of everything.

Henry Oliver: No.

Evan Goldfine: Bach is clearly enriching your life and, and you've spent your career talking about literature mostly. So in what ways does music enrich your life? That, that literature cannot.

Henry Oliver: I've had a very strong response to music since I was young. And I have just had always a great hunger to listen to a lot of music.

I listen to much less than I used to because I prefer now to read in silence, and usually to write in silence as well. But what I said about Bach, giving an expression of feeling, I feel music can do that in a way that language can't. And people often talk about the limits of language.

The struggle to make words mean what you really want them to mean. The fact that when you are conceiving of something [00:04:00] to write, it has this big feeling inside you of what you're doing, and then when you get it onto the page, it always just seems a bit reduced and not quite what you were trying to capture.

Music, I think, gets you a lot closer to the thing you were trying to capture or express, but at the cost of language really means something that you and I can agree what it means.

Music is a much less precise form of communicative exchange, I guess. So I think those are the trade offs, but I come back to it because nothing else can express, his range of moods and feelings.

if you want to know, this is a, this is a great question. At the moment, I'm reading this book by Lamorna Ash. "Don't forget, we're here forever." And it's all about how people are turning back to religion. And she interviewed 60 young people who became Christians. And what she's interested in is how does that happen?

How does it come about that someone else becomes a [00:05:00] Christian? And this is a very difficult thing to get your head around if you're not a Christian. Right? Not just, what are all, what's all this theological talk? What are all these denominations? You believe this, someone else believes that. Just what does that feel ?

I just need to get into the vibes of this whole thing. Well, put some Bach on and you will very quickly be given the feelings of what it is to be devout, what it is to, to love God, what it is to feel the glory of God. Something that in your ordinary life may be incomprehensible to you, Bach can deliver up in a way that language, I think would struggle to break through those barriers.

Evan Goldfine: I often thought when I was listening to this music for my project, especially with the Passions and the Mass and B minor, the idea about sitting several centuries ago in a big cathedral or even a small church, and this was probably also the [00:06:00] loudest thing you ever heard.

Henry Oliver: Yeah.

Evan Goldfine: And the power of the voices and the orchestra together reverberating in the halls.

You're also in community with the people who are around you listening to this, I can't imagine the power of something that in a, in a great performance and, and to think about. Bach there. Also, I, I don't know if he was considered this, this great among, he was just the guy in town who was the composer who happened to have been pretty superlative relative to his peers.

But that was your local guy. And I should say that also that there's no evidence that Bach ever heard the Mass and B minor perform in his lifetime, which is crazy.

Henry Oliver: Absolutely crazy. People talk about Beethoven composing deaf, which obviously is, is fascinating, but I find this more fascinating how, how he managed to do that and, and leave it in such a state of completion and never hear it.

I mean, the power of the inner life must have [00:07:00] been much, much stronger than we are currently aware of. I think.

Evan Goldfine: Do you think we can have a good sense of Bach inner life? I mean, there's very limited extant writings of his that are not about pursuing a job here or there or writing and to try to placate a nobleman.

But that what can we know of, of Bach in ways that would be easier to understand some of the other greats internal lives, or maybe there's just that Romantic movement that is between us today and Bach's time.

Henry Oliver: I'm cautious about this. Someone Kingsley Amis once said, , you don't need to write a biography of a novelist.

He's told you everything about himself, and he's put it into a series of books called novels, but other novelists would deny that and say that it's just an exercise in the use of language. Now we don't believe them and we find all sorts of resonances between their actual lives and their [00:08:00] fictional lives.

I am very cautious of this, and I don't, I don't feel I have a good sense of Bach’s inner life. It's hard to believe that you can write the St. Matthew Passion and not have a very, very intense inner life. But I also know that he was busy. He had a job. He had kids, he was churning out music at a phenomenal rate.

And I don't know, I, I always just wonder, how much time did he have for inner life? Was there some way in which the way he was operating on the manuscript page was a substitute for the inner life and it happened, the inner and the outer were just happening together for him.

I really don't know.

Evan Goldfine: A pure sublimation

Henry Oliver: Something. Yeah. It's startling when when you look into how much time he actually had to do everything that he did, it becomes more of a mystery really.

Evan Goldfine: It must have just in the physical writing of the music. [00:09:00] Just before, not composing, but the physical writing is, is years and years of, of, of time limited by paper and ink.

Henry Oliver: Really. And, and all the other huge demands on his time. Right, right. So, I don't know, you could look at that and say, he must have had an extraordinary inner life and it must have just come pouring out of him. Or you might look in that and say, well, he, how, how could he have had time for an inner life? It must have, he must, his inner life must have lived in his pen.

Yeah. So, I don't know. But he was clearly, something was happening inside that is very alien to the rest of us.

Evan Goldfine: It's unapproachable in a way. And as we get deeper into the music, he feels in some ways further away. For me at least, I just get deeper and deeper into it, and I, I just don't have a feeling of the person.

Whereas I think if you read Jane Austen. Despite what Kingley Amis says, you might have a better sense of what she [00:10:00] might have been to, to sit down with. Do you have that?

Henry Oliver: No, I think Jane Austen remains a great mystery to us. Partly because we don't have enough of her letters, and partly because the letters that we do have in some ways show a bit of a gap with the novels.

And there's a lot of debate about what person she was and she's been, or what she believed, and she's been claimed by, , every ideology, every, every group going. , a bit with Bach, the question about Jane Austen is how did a young woman from a rectory in the countryside become a, a genius of world literature.

She wasn't surrounded by authors, she wasn't going to London, she wasn't given a fancy education. She was raised in quite a liberal manner. She had the run of the library. There were lots of novels. Her father was one of those, , one of those men who kept up and read all, everything that was being [00:11:00] published.

And, and so there was lots of intellectual life in the house, and she wasn't treated , oh, you're a girl, so you can't read. -. But I don't think that really goes any anyway, to explaining how she became Jane Austen. , and Bach is a similar thing, right? He's, he's a a provincial guy, and it turns out that he was the greatest composer ever, just, just sitting there.

And I, to me, that enhances the mystery. I, I don't think we can hope to explain it.

Evan Goldfine: So, I'd to also talk a little bit about Shakespeare. Another one of your, passions. Similarly, Shakespeare's achievements Austen and and Bach are staggering, the breadth and the depth of the work and how they speak to us, through the centuries.

You've spent a lot of time with both of these giant figures. How do you think about them in relation to one another?

Henry Oliver: They're very different. Shakespeare seems to be able to write everything and anything. He seems to have a, a universal [00:12:00] or a panoramic view of human life. Samuel Johnson said that. Shakespeare gives us a, a mingled picture of things.

So at the same time that one man is being carried to his funeral, another man is running off to the tavern. , and this is, this is the bustle of life. Jane Austen isn't that. She works within one strand of social life and she depicts people she's familiar with and she gave advice to her niece. She said. “you must only write about the things you really know and understand.”

And in this story, your characters have gone to Ireland, but you don't know anything about Ireland, and that's pretty painfully obvious. So you should, we should stay at home so that you can write about that. Whereas Shakespeare's happy to just do everything and he, he's not worried about those, those sorts of issues.

And he still makes it compelling and fascinating. And he's a great philosopher. He's a great poet. He's a great observer of [00:13:00] human nature. He's a great dramatist. I mean, he's prolific across these multiple dimensions. What they share is a genius literary technique. I think Shakespeare is very inventive in his depiction of character, in his dramaturgy in the way that he can drive a story through an individual.

And Jane Austen is very inventive in her narrative techniques and in the way that she positions the narrative from the perspective of one character or another. Very, very inventive in that. So those are the sorts of things that they have in common. Samuel Johnson said something, “the essence of poetry is invention.”

And they both sum that up. Bach sums that up as well. Right? Huge, inventive capacity.

Evan Goldfine: Unlimited, it feels like. He had all of these melodies in him and there's this phenomenon I feel, especially when listening to some of the fugues where he sets [00:14:00] something up, maybe a short melody line, and then it's like he's flicking a pinball and, and it just is naturally going follow the path that it's going to go.

And he sets up another line behind it that's gonna follow the same path, in the sand, and if they just move together and he had it all in his head. And, I think that I. The depth that you saw psychologically with Bach is, is akin to the depth that you see in Shakespeare, although he's creating them in characters, whereas Bach is creating them with melody and harmony and structure and rhythm that is speaking to something that moves us in, in similar ways. I mean, it hits you in your heart and it hits you in your head depending on how it's performed.

Henry Oliver: Absolutely. I think to me, Bach's work it, they feel works of nature.

I don't, there's, there's nothing artificial about his best work. There's nothing where you can say, oh, I can see exactly what he's doing, even [00:15:00] when you can see what he's doing. You don't quite know how that has equaled the, the music you've just experienced, and I think that is something a bit with Shakespeare.

He, he takes us beyond what we thought were the capacities of musical language.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. There are moments where you, I hear when Bach is about to take a melody that he had perhaps in a major key, and that he's going to pivot it into something in the minor key and , it's this anticipatory, oh my God, I can't believe this is about to happen.

And that it does. And because it's inevitable feeling. And you can get that in some of the plays, I think as well. Or even great novels, what the plot is that is about to happen and then it comes, and if it's executed beautifully, it can really, really hit, because you have a flavor of what's coming.

Henry Oliver: Yes. It hits even harder. I call this the expectation of astonishment. So I, if, if you say to someone, have the power to forecast the [00:16:00] future, and you see him over there walking down the street,when he gets underneath building number 30, a pane of glass will fall out of the top window and kill him.

And then two minutes later this happens. You wouldn't say, oh, that was not shocking to me because you had I you had given away what was going to happen. It would be worse, it would be more horrifying, right? And there's something about literature where, as you say, very often, explicitly or implicitly, we are told what's going to happen.

And it doesn't make it boring. It doesn't make it less awful or less hilarious or whatever. It, it increases the whole thing. And Bach has this, as I say, I think on another level. And that's why you can listen to Bach again and again and again throughout your life and get more out of it. That's why so many, there's so much potential for new performers with Bach, right?

Because [00:17:00] they can, they can exploit what you are expecting it, and I'm gonna do it, but I'm gonna slightly do it in a new way, and I'm gonna show you, wow, there's even more in here than you realized, and I think that's what makes him very exciting.

Evan Goldfine: On that note, what do you think makes a great performance of Bach or Shakespeare?

I mean, these are both things that live on the page and have to come to us embodied by whoever is living with us right now, or I guess in the, in the case of recordings now, we have a little bit of reference, but what, what makes these performances great?

Henry Oliver: Great. I struggle to articulate this.

I'm not a good music critic, but I don't think it's, I, I think it's to do with more than technical perfection. I think you can hear a very exact performance that is not really the best performance. I saw Mitsuko Uchida recently. She wasn't playing Bach, she was playing Schubert and Mozart.

Oh, and it was insane. [00:18:00] It was one of the best, I went twice. It was two of the best nights at the concert hall I've had. She is able to use very, very precise and careful technique in the service of strong feeling. And I think Bach lends himself very much to that.

I think that's why everyone enjoyed, was it Olafssohn, the new Goldberg recording that came out? I saw that live.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah, I saw that live.

Henry Oliver: Insane.

Evan Goldfine: Right? One of the best con I've been to thousands probably of concerts in my top 10.

Henry Oliver: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And he has that same thing.

Incredible control. Of all different aspects of performance, but he's doing it in the service of strong expression of feeling. And I think Bach because of the religiosity, because of the intensity of what he's trying to do. You have to get some Mozart, I feel you don't have to have the strength of feeling the, the music will do it for you.

[00:19:00] But with Bach, and, and this is I think why Glenn Gould, was a genius of Bach and was really nothing for Mozart, right. 'cause he —

Evan Goldfine: Well I have some pretty strong feelings about his, I think that he expressed a contempt for Mozart and his Mozart playing, which shaded my feelings about Gould on the whole, after hearing some of those records, after hearing his piano sonatas, I went back to say, well what, what is he doing here?

Why did he do that? And I love some Gould on Bach. He's very particular, but I also don't connect with some of it now. It's, it's unusual that someone's so quirky and eccentric became the standard bearer of how, for example, the Well Tempered Clavier is, is played.

But that was my first recording where I would listen over and over again and I found, found the richness in it, but I was able to also listen to others afterwards. And I aw, wow, that is a very particular recording. It exemplifies Gould's own genius for sure. But I'm glad he's not the only performer we have of those pieces. Do still connect with Gould?

You sent email about this. So tell me about how Gould still moves you over the years and have you ever had any complicated feelings about him?

Henry Oliver: I'm a big Glen Gould obsessive. I have never loved his Well-Tempered Clavier. Don't it at all. Can't listen to it. It's, it's weird.

I hate his Mozart recordings. I was offended. I have to turn them off. It's just, it's dreadful. And I think he has, because he was obviously, I don't know if troubled is the right word, but he was an intense person. He was a person of solitude and interiority.

[00:21:00] Maybe he was troubled, he was taking anxiety medication and other things. This is what eventually killed him. And I think, there is, that's very Bachan, right? Whereas Mozart is a composer of the world. He's a composer of social life. , people say the great waste of his talents when he was, when he had patrons and they made him write mints and little dances and some stupid little things, and this guy could be writing you the best operas the world's ever seen, and you are getting little party music. What the hell are you doing? But it's remarkable how good these, silly little pieces are that he's forced to write. And I think that's because he's naturally comic, he's naturally joyous.

There's a certain happiness that only exists when you're listening to Mozart. He's an extrovert, right? He's, his music is, is part and parcel of, of the commerce of life. Gould's not that at all.

Henry Oliver: When you watch those documentaries on [00:22:00] YouTube, which are fabulous, everyone should watch them.

You see him in the recording studio at the piano shop in the cafe with the taxi driver, and he's doing great and he's interacting, I'm not saying anything, but it's not his milieu. It's not his natural state. And when he's back home, by the lake, or in his house, he, he visibly becomes much more at ease and much more attuned to his surroundings.

And I think that really is a temperamental affinity with Bach. And so that's why his, , the p the piano music, the solo piano music, the partitas and stuff, that's why it's so fantastic.

Henry Oliver: Because, okay, he's not a Lutheran or whatever, but he is psychologically a bit of one of those, right?

And it, it just, it aligns him with Bach so well, and so he has that huge inner feeling that maybe he can't [00:23:00] express any other way than through his playing. And sometimes a great act of interpretation is a form of composition, and I think that's, that's what's happening with Bach.

That's obviously how you get new works of philosophy that someone interprets someone else to a degree of just creating a new philosophy on the back of their interpretation. And that's why Gould attracts all this pro and against and all these, and you can love him at one time and hate him at another because he's created some hybrid of Gould and Bach and it's, it is whatever it is.

And it's, he's got so much inside him to express just as Bach did. So I think that's what makes him the best.

Evan Goldfine: It feels him, it feels very, very personal. Everything that he's doing. What do you care for more? The early or late Goldbergs of Glenn Gould?

Henry Oliver: When I was young, I found it just in unconscionable that anyone would not prefer the early [00:24:00] Goldbergs from Gould.

I, I just, when you're so young and you see older people saying things and you're , I just dunno what it must be to be one of these. “What, what is this?” Whereas now I love listening to them both.

Henry Oliver: And I've really come to appreciate the later one. And, I listen in general much more to slower recordings or more classic recordings. When I listen to Gould, I'll do both.

Evan Goldfine: I find the later one to be too slow. I can't do it. I still can't do it.

Henry Oliver: I have come to enjoy slow Bach quite a lot, and I'm just gonna check it on my Apple Music. But my, my current favorite St. Matthew Passion is certainly at the beginning quite slow.

It's Karl Richter from 1980, and he just, he just opens it up and, and slows it down in a way that takes you to the height [00:25:00] of what it must have felt to have these very, very deep and and unified religious feelings. And I think that's what Gould is getting at in the in the late. Goldbergs and I now love them very much.

Evan Goldfine: I had the pleasure of listening to a lot of Karl Richter's recordings in my listening project. I was not particularly familiar with the Cantatas, but that, and that's probably half of the music at least, that Bach composed, in terms of time. And Richter , didn't record all of them altogether, but the ones that he did were slow.

They're very influenced, I feel by,he's definitely listened to a lot of Chopin, and the Romantics and that's informing his Bach interpretations. He also had the best singers. His singers on those recordings are fantastic. Schreier, Dietrich Fischer Dieskau, some of the real heavy hitters of the 20th century recorded with Richter, so, [00:26:00] I'd recommend his cantatas, if you like the St. Matthew's Passion of his as well, also particularly slower than some of the others.

Henry Oliver: I struggle with the cantatas the most, occasionally find recordings I like. But I, I'm gonna try that 'cause I'm really, I've been working at it for a few years and it, it isn't happening for me yet.

Evan Goldfine: I will pick out some favorites for you.

Henry Oliver: That would be great.

Evan Goldfine: Sure when we were talking about Gould and Bach, and we talked a little bit about Mozart being lighter, but Bach and Gould, they're very serious. I guess Beethoven is also probably just about as serious as, as Bach, but probably the most serious.

I mean, when I listen to Beethoven, it's he's trying to shake the world or something, but, but Bach has a deep seriousness about him. Do you find you connect with the seriousness? Can you listen to it? Even when he is being light? It feels very important and not flippant at [00:27:00] all, which is not how I think our culture is well suited towards right now. What do you think about that?

Henry Oliver: I think there is a lot of hunger for seriousness in our culture, and I think people are increasingly persuaded of the need to be serious. And maybe it was the pandemic, maybe it's the fact that there's more war in the world. Maybe it's the volatility of modern politics.

But I think we've lived through a period when people have been in total denial about death and its implications and about the shortness of life and the need, therefore to do what you must do while you can, and to experience the best while you have the time. And people are now coming back to that and people are now realizing that wow, being serious is the whole point of being alive, so maybe we'll have a revival of Bach 'cause of that. I don't know.

Evan Goldfine: I love your ethos of, [00:28:00] we have all these great books. You can read them, you should be reading these great books. They're here for us.

Henry Oliver: Of course, and I get it that Netflix is great and I watch Netflix and whatever, but they're not great in the same way. Everyone knows what it feels to stand on top of a mountain and be amazed, right. To experience true wonder at the state of the world. Everyone knows what it is to listen to music that does that to you. But everyone, and I include myself in this, we get trapped in the limits of our own knowledge, the limits of our own experience.

We become habituated to what we think excellence is. And listening to someone Bach is a constant reminder that you have no idea this man was creating a heaven on earth in music. You have no idea. Please pay more attention to him and stop assuming what excellence is. And that's why I, and that's why I say it because they push the horizons [00:29:00] of your understanding. The great books do the same thing. They push the horizons of your understanding in ways that you can't anticipate.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. Your, your book, I've been thinking about tells the stories of late bloomers and, and you frame them as inspiring figures for the for the rest of us. The people who we've been talking about today are early bloomers, Shakespeare, Austen, Bach. These are not late bloomers. George Harrison was 26 when the Beatles were over. How do we normals deal with these outliers, even if we're hoping for our own second acts?

Henry Oliver: Was Bach really, was he not a late bloomer and an early bloomer? I mean, Art of Fugue right. Late. Right. The late work in Bach is, is truly extraordinary. I don't think he shows any signs of slowing down.

Evan Goldfine: Oh, that's interesting. So he a late bloomer, even though he's starting off early. His early bloom lets his late bloom go even higher than we could have imagined.

Henry Oliver: I, I [00:30:00] don't, I don't listen to the Art of Fugue and think, well, he's been at it for a few years and this is what I expect. I listen to the Art of Fugue and think, where did that come from? And I think there are a lot of composers that. The Beethoven string quartets, right? You can have the highest possible view of Beethoven's early work and still listen to those string quartets and want to know where did they come from.

Henry Oliver: Mozart is the same actually. I have Mozart as a very late bloomer in the sense that if you take the view that, not 10,000 hours necessarily, but it takes a certain amount of dedicated practice to become really excellent at something. The story with Mozart is that he starts that dedicated practice much earlier than the rest of us. Despite that the music that we record and listen to from Mozart and that we put on in the concert hall is all the second half of his career,

So it's K. 330 and onwards. [00:31:00] Obviously there are a few things earlier and, and whatever. But all this, if I asked you to name, just give me five pieces of Mozart.

Tell me the Mozart, you the Mozart, we put in car adverts, the most performed in the console. It's all later on in his career. And what we think of as Mozart's innovations, piano, concertos, the operas, some of the other work, it's all in the last 10 years, right? So I even think Mozart, it sounds crazy 'cause he's the most famous child prodigy.

I even think of him as a late bloomer. And I think in some ways this is inherent in music. Because the great composers are very experimental. They're always making discoveries, and they're always incorporating their discoveries in their next thing, their next work. Someone like Bruckner doesn't even start doing symphonies until he is halfway through his career.

Evan: Yeah.

Henry Oliver: Now, his early choral music is phenomenal. I mean, really, truly beautiful music, but it turns out you [00:32:00] can pivot to symphonies quite late on and do great work. Schubert, the last big piano Sonata writes before he dies. Where was he going next? Could we, could we not kill him, please? So I think it's, I think you can take some, if you want to take a hopeful lesson from these people, which maybe you shouldn't, but if you want to, the lesson is that if you keep doing the work and you keep being inventive, you can be a late bloomer, even if you were an early bloomer.

Evan Goldfine: It's a nice thing to ruminate on. Now. Just pivoting to, to one other thing I wanted to ask you before we talk about some specific pieces.

For a literature fan, you're a little bit more open to artificial intelligence than some of your peers. Will we get great artificial intelligence, composed literature or music in our lifetimes?

Henry Oliver: I don't know enough about, I'm, I'm not a technical [00:33:00] enough person to be able to say timelines.

My impression from what I see among the AI experts is, is yes, in principle. My view is that scaling has solved a lot and it seems to have solved things that. Was up for debate whether it would solve those things. And the trajectory of the progress is incredible. If you go back and look at the things people were complaining about two years ago, those now seem extraordinary, finished. And so I'm on the side of we need to keep an eye on this and, and surely it will. The current output is quite bad.

It's much worse at writing poetry than it is at medicine now. I think that should be inherently puzzling. That's not the case for humans once humans are [00:34:00] advanced enough, in terms of evolution, in terms of human culture, in terms of tools and technology.

Once they can do medicine. They've already been brilliant poets. We got Paradise Lost before we got penicillin. So I want to know why it is, why the, to me, the progress seems very slow on poetry compared to other areas, but I think that just means it'll come later.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Henry Oliver: The big objection will be that AI is not in the world and that the creation of art really depends on physicality, smell, and touch and, and sound and so forth. And that the, the inner life that we've been talking about is an offshoot of the outer life of sensuality. And that may be what's limiting AI right now, but I really don't know.

And I think we start to reach a speculative zone very fast. The other option is AI will have its [00:35:00] own taste in literature. That won't be human taste. So someone set up a, an AI poetry assessment tool, and it's just some guy setting up a tool so we shouldn't take it super seriously.

And I tested it by giving it famous poems and it was, oh, incredible, 9.5 out of 10, so inventive, I can't believe the things it's doing with language. And I was like, great. And it, it knew, who's a nine, who's a seven? It was pretty good at not overrating certain people and whatever.

And then I gave it some AI poetry expecting it to say, “Really, you're giving me this after Emily Dickinson? No, this is not good.” And it was saying, Ooh, this is so clever, this is so inventive. And I was like, what? But the more I did it, the more I thought, well, I think AI will just appreciate poetry differently.

And, I've heard this from a couple of my friends who had it write a sci-fi novel. He didn't love what it [00:36:00] wrote, but the machine loved what it wrote.

Evan Goldfine: We all love our own reflection.

Henry Oliver: Well, maybe I just wonder if there will be something inherently different about AI art.

And that that will perpetuate the gulf we feel between us and the AI’s right now. But I still think that it will be possible now or in the near future for you to read something, to think it's really good and to not be confident. Maybe you'll say, I'm confident it's not AI, but you can't reasonably be confident of that anymore. And I think that reality is it's either with us or it's very close.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. I have not been impressed by any of the music that's been composed yet.

Henry Oliver: God, no.

Evan Goldfine: God no. I hope there's a gulf. I hope there continues to be a gulf, but I'm, I'm not sure

Henry Oliver: What, but why if someone, if, if, if someone gave you some music to listen to and it's Bach level. Brilliant. Do you care? [00:37:00]

Evan Goldfine: I want it. Well, what do we mean by Bach level? Brilliant. Is it is Bach was inventive in what he was creating. I mean you, I could see that the AI would be able to create a reasonable simulacrum of another prelude and fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Henry Oliver: No, I'm just saying assume it produces something original and new and you listen to it and you are wow, this is insane.

This is as good as Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Schumann, whatever. And then someone says, oh, this is AI. I don't think you'll care. I think to begin with you might be a bit whatever, but this goes back to what we were saying about the inner life. Assume someone finds some letter somewhere. Oh, it's been kept in a cookery book.

In an archive and we didn't know it was here, and it's JS Bach saying. “My friend said, I must have an extraordinary inner life. What does he know? I'm empty on the inside, man. I just, I just throw notes on the page. It's all, it's all a technical game to me.” I wouldn't fall out of love with his music. No way. [00:38:00] Whatever. So if the, if the AI can do it and it is good and you just hear, you go to the concert hall and someone plays on a piano and then they're like, AI composed it, fine, I think that'll be fine. I think people will have a, a strong reaction against it, but it'll be more ideological than anything else.

They'll be freaked out by the fact that AI has made such an impression upon them. They won't be denying the impression.

Evan Goldfine: Maybe the gulf feels so wide now because I can't imagine what that would actually be, but we'll have to wait to see. We'll have to wait to see what it is.

Henry Oliver: Exactly. So, and that's why a one good analogy is modernism.

Whether or not it's true that people threw, threw chairs at the Stravinsky performance or whatever, right? they weren't denying that it was art in their, when they did that, they were trying to say, this is not, but everything about their reaction was saying, boy, this is some art. It's just not the art you expected or could have expected.

Evan Goldfine: Let's [00:39:00] talk about a couple of your favorite recordings before we wind up. What should everybody listen to from your personal canon?

Henry Oliver: The Three Part Inventions played by Glenn Gould live in Moscow is my favorite Bach album. And I go back to it again and again. It was not for a long time, I didn't know it, but once I found it, it became the best thing.

It's a niche pick. I can't claim that it's Bach's best music or, or anything that, but it really, It's really brilliant for me and that that's what I would, that's what I would suggest. I want to know, I want to know what's your dark horse pick for a Bach piece?

Evan Goldfine: Ah, there are some songs that I heard with Richter and Peter Schreier, the great tenor from the 20th century, playing just these, these organ and voice, just the two of them together.

Very, very delicate. Some really extraordinary music. And [00:40:00] I will drop the links to, to those in the notes to the show as well. But yeah, I was really taken by a lot of the singing during my listening tour of this music in ways that I was not expecting to. When I to listen to classical singing, I tend to go to Schubert and Schumann in particular.

The great songs from their great song cycles I've always been really connected to. But earlier than that, or even the, the more religious music, I, I was never able to. But some of, some of the stuff that I heard this year, I keep returning to.

Henry Oliver: That's great. I'm gonna listen to that.

Evan Goldfine: Henry, this has been so great. Thank you for talking Bach and Shakespeare and the expectations of astonishment and I'll be thinking about that as I read my next big thick novels.

Henry Oliver: Good. Well, thank you for having me. I enjoyed it very much.

Evan Goldfine: Alright, take care.