Culture

Cello on his back, Dane Johansen treks across Spain, performing Bach along the way

Last summer, cellist Dane Johansen hiked 580 miles across the northern rim of Spain. His plan was to record the Bach Cello Suites in the churches that line the ancient pilgrimage route known as the Camino de Santiago and turn the experience into a documentary.

"I figured if anyone happened to show up in the churches while I was playing, that would be OK," he said. "But I wasn't planning on doing public recitals."

The Spaniards had other ideas. When he got off the plane, Johansen discovered that his trek had been announced. "In town after town it was advertised as a concert," he said. "I got to the first church and discovered hundreds of people waiting."

Johansen, who will be the guest soloist at the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra concert on Saturday night, was born in Fairbanks. He's the grandson of the late University of Alaska engineering professor Hendryx Woodrow "Woody" Johansen, for whom that town's Johansen Expressway is named. His father, Tony, was an engineer; his mother, Gail, a violin teacher. "I have three sisters, all violinists," he noted.

He attended West Valley High School before completing his senior year at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he went on to college and earned his undergraduate degree. He continued music studies at the Paris Conservatoire and then the Juilliard School in New York, his home base for the past nine years.

In addition to teaching at Juilliard now, he has a busy performance schedule, on the road for as much as nine months each year, often with the Escher String Quartet. The quartet played in Hong Kong shortly before he arrived in Anchorage this week.

For most of his trips, he has to buy a second ticket for his instrument, which rides next to him in a full-fare passenger seat. But on last summer's hike, the cello traveled on Johansen's back, along with his sleeping bag, rain gear and other supplies.

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Swollen fingers

Johansen said he first had the idea of the Spanish trip in 2008. A composer friend had walked the Appalachian Trail and composed music for string quartet during the journey. "I thought, I could do something like that with my cello. I wanted to enjoy the outdoors, combine physical adventure with music."

He was familiar with wilderness hiking from growing up in Alaska, where one can go for days or weeks without seeing another human being. But the Camino de Santiago is traveled by tens of thousands of trekkers each year. They follow the steps of generations of travelers who, since Roman times, have followed the trail to pray, fulfill vows and experience a transformative renewal of mind and spirit by testing their physical limits.

"I knew there'd be plenty of people around," Johansen said. "What made Spain such a great choice was that every day I'd be walking through towns with these wonderful old churches where I could play."

He mentioned his idea to another friend, Grammy Award-winning sound engineer Jesse Lewis, who suggested he should record the performances. Another friend with experience in video production thought it might make a good film. He assembled a crew. In the end, the troupe numbered nine people.

"We lucked out with our sponsorship," Johansen said. They received donations for everything from equipment to energy bars. "$60,000 funded the whole trip for all of us."

Upon arriving at a church, the crew would record him playing a selected Bach suite before the concert, then again with an audience during the public performance.

Not only did the churches differ acoustically, Johansen said, they were also visually distinct. They ranged from modern buildings by Antoni Gaudi to gilded baroque sanctuaries and stark, 1,000-year-old monasteries. "That made me respond to each one differently," he said.

So did his long-distance walking, between 15 and 20 miles each day, sometimes more. "When you're walking, you're not practicing like you might under normal circumstances," he said. "Your arms are swinging back and forth all day. Your fingers get swollen and numb. One day I'd covered 25 miles and was out of gas. I wasn't sure that I could do this. But the audience seemed to love it.

"It got easier when I stopped worrying about everything being perfect, when I began to see it not so much as a music project but as a larger philosophical experience."

He didn't plan out in advance which of the six Bach suites he would perform at any given location. But on reviewing the recordings, he realized that they were pretty evenly distributed over the course of the 45-day excursion. The trip included five days without hiking and other days playing in additional churches where he did not record. But he stuck with Bach the whole time.

"I got very familiar with those pieces," he said.

To the edge

No one in the crew could speak much Spanish, Johansen said, but all along the road they were welcomed.

"We connected through music. In a lot of these little towns people brought us to their homes, they invited us to meals. We were seeing a different side of Spain from what most tourists see. I think it's because we weren't just passing through and taking pictures. We were bringing them something and they appreciated it."

He met with several young cellists along the way, did some teaching and participated in a local cello meeting.

His father joined him for the last leg of the journey, an additional three-day walk from the traditional final stop for pilgrims, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where the apostle James is said to be buried. It brought them to the Atlantic Ocean, a spot on the western edge of Europe identified as the end of the world during the Middle Ages.

There on cliffs overlooking the sea, Johansen performed a final concert.

"There were a lot of pilgrims there," he said, "a lot of people I'd met along the way."

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Saturday's concert will be a double debut for Johansen. It marks the first time he's played as a professional in his home state. (A lecture/recital at First Presbyterian Church on Tuesday was a pay-what-you-can event.) And it will be the first time he has performed the Haydn Cello Concerto. Despite having been written more than 200 years ago, the upbeat classical piece is considered a "new" addition to cello literature because it was forgotten shortly after its first performance and only rediscovered in 1961, Johansen said.

It will precede the enormous Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler. "I'm looking forward to hearing the Mahler -- from a seat in the audience," Johansen said with a smile. "I've played it. It's gigantic. I don't know how you open for it, but the Haydn will make a nice appetizer."

After the concert he'll be back on the road, or rather the sky, flying to Palm Beach, Florida, for concerts that will raise funds to help complete the movie, titled "The Walk to Fisterra: A Cellist's Journey."

"I figure it will take another $50,000 to button everything up," he said.

"It's a good thing I really like to travel," he added. "I've played in almost every country where I can play. I love to see new places. And you meet wonderful people everywhere. The world is full of them."

DANE JOHANSEN will be the featured soloist with the Anchorage Symphony at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 31, in Atwood Concert Hall. The program will include Haydn's Cello Concerto and Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Tickets are available at centertix.net.

THE WALK TO FISTERRA: A CELLIST'S JOURNEY, a documentary about Johansen's hike along the Camino de Santiago, is still in progress. For more about the project, including ways to donate or purchase advance copies of the film and recording, go to www.walktofisterra.com.

Mike Dunham

Mike Dunham was a longtime ADN reporter, mainly writing about culture, arts and Alaska history. He worked in radio for 20 years before switching to print. He retired from the ADN in 2017.

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