A program that invites listeners to follow a single musical idea as it unfolds, deepens, and transforms across time. Spanning composers, epochs, and styles, these works trace the evolution of the singing bass line into a fully expressive, independent voice—across three centuries and refracted through changing keyboard roles. Anchoring the program is Johann Sebastian Bach, Token Creek’s north star, whose music establishes both the structural DNA and the program’s expressive premise. From this foundation, the program explores works by composers who inherit and transform Bach’s conception of line, counterpoint, and instrumental voice: Harbison’s contemporary reflections on the lineage, heard in context of the intermediaries of Debussy and Prokofiev.
Cellist Robert Burkhart, known as “the adventurous cellist” (The New Yorker), and pianist Avedis Manoogian—close friends since their student days, their musical connection undimmed across time—reunite in Madison for this richly varied and expansive program.
Program
BACH | Sonata in G major for Viola da Gamba & Keyboard, BWV 1027 (ca. 1720)
HARBISON | Suite for Unaccompanied Cello (1993)
DEBUSSY | Sonata for Cello and Piano, L.135 (1915)
BACH | Adagio from Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major, BWV 564 (ca.1717)
HARBISON | Nocturne, for piano (2018)
PROKOFIEV | Cello Sonata in C Major, Op. 119 (1949)
The Artists
Cellist Robert Burkhart combines a deep commitment to the existing cello repertoire with what the New Yorker magazine calls an “adventurous” spirit in new music. With performance credits at Alice Tully Hall, Bargemusic, Carnegie Weill Recital Hall, Merkin Hall, and The Rose Studio at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Robert has also appeared as a soloist throughout Japan as a member of the New York Symphonic Ensemble, and been featured in recital on WQXR’s “Young Artist Showcase.”
At the center of new music in New York, Robert has performed with the American Modern Ensemble, Argento New Music Project, Fireworks Ensemble, Newspeak, and SONYC. Recent collaborations include Uri Caine, Georg Friedrich Haas, Aaron Jay Kernis, Steve Mackey, Joan Tower, Charles Wourinen, and Chen Yi. He has performed the New York premiere of John Harbison’s Abu Ghraib for cello and piano, and was the soloist in Augusta Read Thomas’s Passion Prayers for cello and chamber ensemble at the New York Times Center.
Robert’s major teachers include Paul Tobias at The Mannes College of Music and Uri Vardi at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he has worked with Timothy Eddy, Aldo Parisot, and Janos Starker at festivals and masterclasses. Robert has taught at Juilliard Pre-college, Mannes Prep, Syracuse University, and Music Conservatory of Westchester, and been artist-in-residence at Yale University and the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. His recent CD “20/21: Music for Cello and Piano from the 20th and 21st Centuries,” features pianist Blair McMillen and the premiere of a work for cello and piano by composer Andrew Waggoner. Robert’s recording of solo Bach on the American Express commercial “Don’t Take Chances. Take Charge.” has garnered national attention. https://robertpburkhart.com/
Pianist Avedis Manoogian grew up in a uniquely creative household: his parents—violin virtuoso Vartan Manoogian and the imaginative visual artist Brigitte Manoogian—instilled both technical rigor and artistic curiosity from an early age. The family moved to Madison when Avedis was a child, coinciding with Vartan’s appointment to the UW School of Music after serving on the faculty at the North Carolina School of the Arts.
Avedis began his formal musical training with pianist and John Cage scholar Ellsworth Snyder, and went on to study at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with Caroll Chilton and Howard Karp, followed by advanced work in Minneapolis with Margot Garrett.
After his studies, he spent several years in Cincinnati, where he became an integral part of the city’s performing arts scene. He performed for ballet companies, contemporary dance studios, and theater productions, and collaborated widely with composers, chamber ensembles, and improvisers. He also served as rehearsal pianist, accompanist, and musical director, honing a versatility and sensitivity that would define his approach to collaborative work.
With his recent return to Madison, Avedis teaches at Muso and pursues inventive collaborations, including projects with legendary Roscoe Mitchell, founder of the avant garde Art Ensemble of Chicago. His work continues to explore the intersections of jazz, cabaret, and improvisatory chamber music, bringing a lifetime of experience in both classical and experimental traditions to every performance.
Notes
A program that invites listeners to follow a single musical idea as it unfolds, deepens, and transforms across time. Spanning composers, epochs, and styles, these works trace the evolution of the singing bass line into a fully expressive, independent voice—across three centuries and refracted through changing keyboard roles.
Anchoring the program is Johann Sebastian Bach, Token Creek’s north star, whose music establishes both the structural DNA and the program’s expressive premise. The G major Gamba Sonata (BWV 1027) presents a world in which the bass instrument is already lyrical, agile, and conversational, while the keyboard participates as an equal partner rather than mere continuo. The Adagio from BWV 564, though originally for organ, deepens this idea into something more architectural and inward: a sustained, improvisatory meditation where harmonic motion and melodic line become inseparable. The sonata models an ideal of conversational counterpoint between instruments, whil thee the Adagio distills a more solitary, rhapsodic voice—ornamented, improvisatory, and suspended in time. Together, they establish two poles: dialogue and introspection.
From this foundation, the program explores works by composers who inherit and transform Bach’s conception of line, counterpoint, and instrumental voice.
The two pieces by John Harbison act as contemporary reflections on that lineage. Harbison’s works do not merely “respond” to Bach; they inhabit his premises. The Suite for Unaccompanied Cello (1993) stands in direct dialogue with Bach’s solo string writing—absorbing its polyphonic implications while translating them into a modern, updated language. The later Nocturne for piano (2018) shifts the focus inward: here the keyboard, once a partner in dialogue, becomes a solitary, resonant space, extending the introspective qualities already latent in Bach’s Adagio. Harbison becomes the hinge of the program, translating inherited forms into a contemporary, personal idiom.
Between these poles sit two early 20th-century reimaginings of the cello–piano relationship. Claude Debussy’s Sonata (1915) strips texture to its essentials, treating sound itself—gesture, color, silence—as structural elements, while still preserving an almost Baroque clarity of exchange. It acts as a kind of prism. Its economy, its avoidance of Germanic development, and its emphasis on gesture and color reimagine what “line” can mean—less a continuous thread than a sequence of evocative utterances. In this context, Debussy becomes a crucial intermediary between Bach’s architecture and Harbison’s modern introspection.
Sergei Prokofiev’s C major Sonata (1949), by contrast, restores breadth and lyricism, but with a distinctly modern edge: the cello sings expansively, often against a piano part that is by turns percussive, ironic, and deeply supportive. Written under constraint yet suffused with resilience, it restores the long melodic span—now charged with 20th-century weight. If Bach shows us the ideal and Harbison its contemporary questioning, Prokofiev offers something like reclamation: melody regained, but not unchanged.
Heard together, these works form a direct through-line: the bass voice—whether gamba, cello, or left hand of the piano—emerges from its Baroque role as foundation to become protagonist, narrator, and, at times, solitary thinker. The keyboard evolves in parallel, from continuo to equal partner to independent poetic voice.