Boundless Bach at the 12th rollout of the Jerusalem Piano Festival

This year’s Piano Festival, the bat mitzvah edition, has gone for a thematic anchor that should please music lovers from across the genre and stylistic spectrum. The three-day program at the Jerusalem Theatre (December 29-31) will revolve around the expansive oeuvre and far-reaching influence of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Perennial artistic director Prof. Michael Wolpe, as is his unfettered wont, has flexed the boundaries of what is already a highly eclectic field of play by featuring several contemporary and new orchestral arrangements of Bach scores originally written for smaller ensembles or solo instrumentalists.

Wolpe has been a shining beacon of openness and has stuck to his all-embracing approach to the sonic art, relating to music as just that, without overly clinging onto genre, style, or even cultural milieu definitions. That laissez-faire mindset has led, inter alia, to the inclusion of the world premiere of Ronen Shapira’s Genesis – Restart piano concerto, performed by Revital Hachamoff, in the forthcoming festival lineup.

Shapira a 59-year-old composer and multi-instrumentalist who, over the years, has tended to walk the wilder side of his professional road. He has worked his way through Western classical music, rock, ethnically leaning commercial material, and Arabic music, to mention just some of the areas his fertile imagination, creative bent, and studied musicianship have taken him to.

His contribution to the Piano Festival is on the middle day, as part of the “Bach for Two and Three Pianos” program, which starts at 8:30 p.m. Shapira’s slot comes immediately after the intermission, following a couple of debut showings.

There is the Israeli premiere of an orchestration of Bach’s Prelude from English Suite No. 5 in E Minor by early-20th-century English composer and arranger Gerard Williams, and a world premiere of “Arafel” for piano and orchestra by Georgian-born composer Hana Ajiashvili, performed by soloist Amit Dolberg and the eminently user-friendly Jerusalem Street Orchestra overseen by conductor Michal Oren.

The rest of the evening’s repertoire takes in Bach’s Concerto for Two Pianos No. 1 in C Minor; Concerto No. 1 for Three Pianos in D Minor; and Concerto No. 2 for Three Pianos in C Major. Wolpe has also thrown his arranger’s hat into the programmatic ring, with a reworking for orchestra of the Choral from “The Good Shepherd” cantata, scheduled for the opening evening of the festival.

The “Bach for Two and Three Pianos” concert makes for one helluva evening’s entertainment, but Shapira takes the presentation offering and listening experience a step or two further. First we need to get some kind of handle on how Shapira fixes up the instrument before he, or on this occasion Hachamoff, gets his hands on the keys.

This is serious considered stuff and no doubt will come as a surprise to the vast majority of us. That goes doubly for folks whose favored music belongs exclusively to the Western classical domain. Shapira paid his dues in the said field, also branching out into jazz, in which, in fact, he obtained a master’s degree – in improvisation – at the University of Michigan.

He is a great admirer of Bach, but says: “I smashed all the knowledge relating to the well-tempered approach with my inventions,” with a not so subtle nod in the direction of Bach’s universally celebrated Well-Tempered Clavier collection of preludes and fugues. “From that point of view, Bach is on the opposite side of that.”

Shapira certainly does that, principally by means of his envelope-pushing arsenal of tailored knickknacks he painstakingly crafted in order to tweak and twist the innards of the piano every which way to produce a veritable plethora of sounds and textures more readily associated with very different instruments.

The musical bottom line struck, pardon the pun, a chord or two. “I wrote something in a maqam for a work dedicated to the Second Lebanon War. One critic wrote it was a new development in the West, and I had made completely new use of the instrument.”

There was some negative fallout from the daring escapade. “The piano tuner in Japan never managed to retune the piano back to exactly the way it was before,” Shapira recalls. “Then I realized that doing that [messing around with the piano strings] simply wasn’t practical.”

Help came from a British out-of-the-box thinker by the name of Geoff Smith. “He invented what he called the fluid piano. I thought, ‘Wow! That’s exactly what I want.’ He explained that he reduced the tension of the [piano] strings.” That enabled Smith to play around with microtonalities of each individual string, even during a performance. When Shapira asked Smith how much it would cost him to buy a fluid piano, he quickly realized that obtaining the finished article, as is, was way out of his financial league.

But necessity is the mother of invention, and Shapira began to dig into the mechanics of what he wanted to achieve. “I tried a million things and played around [with the piano]. I produced all sorts of effects, like an electric bass, a drum kit, a harp, a harpsichord, all on the piano.” It was a matter of trial and error, throwing into the piano interior almost anything he could think of to change the sound and texture produced by depressing the piano keys. “I used magnets, bits of cloth, all kinds of accessories, anything to change the way the piano sounds, and all through acoustic means.”

He was up and running, using his gradually accumulating knowledge and hands-on experience to elicit instrumental emissions one would not expect to get out of a piano. He performed his newfound craft across a broad range of genres and styles all over the world, frequently taking old, beat-up pianos and giving them a new eclectic lease on life. Presumably, after that initial experience with the top-of-the-range Steinway in Japan, Shapira became a little more circumspect before setting his instrument for the particular occasion.

It was, he feels, nothing short of a watershed event in the annals of Western instrumental music. “I created, in practice, a new acoustic instrument. It is a postmodern development in the respect that I didn’t want, for example, to just make the sounds of bells. I wanted to be able to divide the piano up horizontally the way I want it, the way I feel at the time, to achieve the multicultural mix I am looking for.”

By now it had become patently clear that Shapira has no bounds, at least in his head, and constantly strives to remove any perceived – or actual – constraints on his artistic endeavor. He had arrived at a frustrating point on his path to limitless pianistic expression. “Every time, it was a one-way situation. I changed a piano, and it couldn’t be changed back.” He needed something fully malleable that could be set ad hoc for the project at hand. Luckily, he had a pal with the requisite know-how to help shine a light on the way ahead.

By chance, he made some progress when he found an industrial component in a hardware store that fit snugly under the piano strings, which enabled him to extemporize at will. Still, it wasn’t a perfect solution for his tonal palette. “I have a childhood friend named Aviad Raveh; he’s a senior employee at [American gaming software and AI data processing leader] Nvidia.”

Ultimately, Raveh and Shapira came up with a corporeal solution for the latter’s instrumental shenanigan aspirations. “We found something called Delrin. It’s a sort of superplastic component. They use it for car handles and that sort of thing. It is very durable and is flexible enough to resonate all the sound [produced via the piano keys and strings].” It also comes in at an eminently affordable, minuscule fraction of Smith’s creation.

That gave Shapira complete freedom of maneuver.

“I can go to any concert hall in the world and adapt the piano to what I need, without changing the structure of the piano,” he declares.

Presumably, that will come as a great relief to any prospective collaborators who would prefer not to end up having to pay a small fortune to try to restore their piano to its original sonorous state.

“You just insert the components [to flex the piano strings] and remove them afterwards.”

Sounds simple and, when Shapira explains the business in words of one syllable, perfectly logical.

Shapira produces a compact box of tricks from his bag. I see small plastic – Delrin – components with prongs and different colored wires attached. “You insert this under the string and raise it a bit so you can shift the sound by an eighth tone or quarter tone.” The latter is a basic element of Arabic music.

“Ninety percent of my students are Arabs,” he notes. “They are interested in this. They come to me because of these inventions.” And because, like their teacher, they are looking to roam the vast domains of sonic creation free of physical limitations.

He feels that his inclusion in the Piano Festival is a natural marriage. “Bach is a joy. I inserted his Prelude No. 2 in my concerto.” Naturally, the original work comes in for some sonic massaging. “I add some noise and all sorts of things, and quarter tones.”

Sounds like a pretty accurate musical portrayal of these times. The concerto also feeds off some of the passages of Shapira’s artistic road to date and disciplines he has acquired en route. “There are three movements to the work. One is tempestuous, one is very lyrical – classical – and a toccata [improvisation-based section].” There is also an addendum to the concerto which gets the members of the audience in on the creative act. It should make for quite a sensory and possibly emotional experience for one and all.

Elsewhere in the Piano Festival program, there is a free concert by the youthful Lu Yehi Orchestra in the theater lobby, and a gratis offering of Bachesque jazz in the same place.

There is a slew of local premieres, such as Concerto for Piano and Orchestra by Viktor Ullmann, who was incarcerated at Theresienstadt and later murdered in Auschwitz; an orchestral arrangement of Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor by Edward Elgar; and an expanded orchestral rendition of Bach’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor.

Wolpe’s arrangement of Ullmann’s Variations on a Hebrew Folk Song for Orchestra is also in the mix, as are Bach’s Piano Concertos No. 4 in A Major, and No. 3 in D major, his Concerto for Piano and Oboe in D Minor, and Concerto Grosso No. 1 for Piano and Strings by 20th-century Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch.

Tomer Lev’s MultiPiano Ensemble will be pressed into service on the last day of the festival, with Lev’s arrangement of Bach’s Concerto for Four Pianos in A Minor, and the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra performs three works, including Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D Major, and the Harpsichord Concert in D Minor, with Gili Loftus on the solo instrument.