Bach's Lunch, variations on themes by J.S. Bach, for string quartet

• Composer: Danny Seidenberg
• Period: Contemporary (1950- )

Review

A witty jazz treatment of themes by Johann Sebastian Bach makes this short string quartet work a very effective and crowd-pleasing encore piece.

Danny Seidenberg is the violist of the Turtle Island String Quartet, established in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late '80s as a group that not only played the traditional classical literature of that particular instrumental formation, but also was at home in pop, jazz, country, traditional American folk, and east Indian classical music. Seidenberg evidently wrote this work to serve as a lagniappe for its classical-oriented concerts and appearances with symphony orchestras.

It uses several Bach motives, which go past almost too fast to notice, but mainly it is a concatenation of the main themes of two of the Leipzig master's most famous orchestral pieces: the Double Violin Concerto and the First Brandenburg Concerto.

The piece becomes jazzier as it progresses, until a rib-tickling moment when the cello takes on the role of a slap bass part. While the musical material evokes Bach, the playing style for the strings in most of the piece comes from the era of The Hot Club and jazz violin greats Joe Venuti and Stéphane Grappelli. ~ Joseph Stevenson, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
A Night in Tunisia, A Week in Detroit	2002
The Hamburg Concert	1998

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