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Stories   >   Bach and bluegrass at the Bowl / Los Angeles Times

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Bach and bluegrass at the Bowl / Los Angeles Times

Posted: August 29, 2015

Bluegrass has its roots in Appalachian music. Appalachian ballads have their roots in European dance music. No composer elevated dance music to higher spiritual grounds than Bach did. For all the off-putting genrefication of music these days, this has never been an art form suitable for a silo mentality. Music's model is more the brain, with networks of neurons becoming ever more connected.

Hence the congenial night at the Hollywood Bowl Thursday entitled "From Bach to Bluegrass." A British Baroque music specialist, Nicholas McGegan, conducted Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 1. The popular, cross-genre bassist Edgar Meyer supplied the bluegrass. The evening ended with Copland's "Appalachian Spring." All, as McGegan reminded us, are dance music.

The outlier was the Bass Concerto No. 2 in B minor by Giovanni Bottesini, a 19th century Italian composer who is remembered, when remembered at all, as the Paganini of the bass. But once Meyer got through this slight piece, to which he added his own bluesy and bouncy cadences, it might as well have been dance music, close enough to bluegrass for comfort.

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