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~ Boulder Bach Beat hopes to stimulate conversations about the ways Bach’s music succeeds in building bridges between populations separated by language, culture, geography and time.

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Tag Archives: St. John Passion

Bach in Valletta

04 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Other Artists, World View

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Cappella Mediterranea, countertenor, dance, Dmytro Sukhovienko, Ensemble Villancico, European Union Baroque Ensemble, Floriana, flute, Geronimo Abos, Gluck, Handel, Iestyn Davies, Il diluvio universale, Joanne Camilleon, Kölner Akademie, Leonardo García Alarcón, London, Lukas Foss, Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, Maltese, Michelangelo Falvetti, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Passacaglia Baroque Ensemble, Peter Stark, piano, Rebecca Hall, Robert King, Sigiswald Kuijken, St. John Co-Cathedral, St. John Passion, St. Publius Church, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, Teatru Manoel, The King’s Consort, Valletta, Valletta International Baroque Ensemble, Valletta International Baroque Festival, violoncello da spalla

St. Publius Church in Floriana

St. Publius Church in Floriana

The third edition of the Valletta International Baroque Festival 2015 starts on 10 January 2015 with twenty-one events over fifteen days in seven venues.

The 2015 Festival is dedicated to the memory of Maltese composer Geronimo Abos as 2015 is the tercentennial anniversary of his birth. His music will be performed by Die Kölner Akademie, Passacaglia Baroque Ensemble and the Valletta International Baroque Ensemble.

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment returns to perform the glorious Bach St. John Passion (BWV 245) in St. John’s Co-Cathedral. This will be offset by Michelangelo Falvetti‘s magnificent Il diluvio universale, performed by the Cappella Mediterranea under the baton of Leonardo García Alarcón at St. Publius Church in Floriana, a new addition to the list of venues for 2015.

The Malta Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Peter Stark, will present an innovative program of twentieth century works inspired by the Baroque which includes a flute concerto by Lukas Foss performed by the orchestra’s own flautist Rebecca Hall.

The Festival program also includes music ranging from Baroque piano transcriptions of music by Bach, Handel and Gluck, performed by Dmytro Sukhovienko, sacred and profane Baroque music from the Americas performed by Ensemble Villancico, and Handel concert arias presented by Robert King conducting The King’s Consort and countertenor Iestyn Davies.

Bach features strongly in this Festival. His Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12) are performed by the world-renowned Sigiswald Kuijken on a violoncello da spalla, and his Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) by local pianist Joanne Camilleon. The European Union Baroque Ensemble will perform music by Handel and his London friends, and the Festival’s resident ensemble, the Valletta International Baroque Ensemble, will perform at two concerts.

The Festival also includes events specifically for children and culminates with the Baroque Festival Ball to be held in Teatru Manoel on Saturday, 24 January 2015.

Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Works, Organology

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bass, basso continuo, cantata, Christmas, Christoph Wolff, dialogue, Leipzig, oboe, recorder, Salomon Franck, soprano, St. John Passion, Stradivarius, Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn, viola da gamba, viola d’amore, Weimar

Stradivari's pattern for a viola d'amore bridge

Stradivari’s pattern for a viola d’amore bridge

Bach’s cantata Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn (BWV 152) was first performed three hundred years ago on 30 December 1714, the Sunday after Christmas. With a text written by Salomon Franck, the Weimar court poet, the cantata is the earliest extant example of a dialogue, a technique that Bach repeated in his third annual cycle of cantatas written for Leipzig.

Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn is scored for soprano and bass soloists and four solo instruments: recorder, oboe, viola d’amore, viola da gamba and basso continuo. Christoph Wolff calls attention to the “colorful and delicate effects achievable with these forces.”

Among the extant Bach cantatas, only Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn employs the viola d’amore. The composer, however, made extensive use of a pair of these instruments in his scoring for the St. John Passion (BWV 245).

Listening Without Preconceptions

16 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Other Artists, Video Recordings

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Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, David Weininger, DVD, Mark Padmore, New York, Peter Sellars, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, tenor, The Boston Globe

Mark Padmore

Mark Padmore

By his own admission, Mark Padmore is “not the kind of singer who thinks about my voice all the time,” he said in a recent interview. Which is not to say that Padmore  doesn’t sing well; his airy and exquisitely supple tone is a sonic delight. But the mechanics of producing beautiful sound have never been at the root of his artistry.

What makes Padmore special is instead a quality that he refers to more than once during a conversation as “being in the moment”: an expressive intensity that seeks to revitalize a relationship with a piece of music – both his own and an audience’s – without artifice, and without drawing attention to himself.

“What I’ve tried to do, kind of with everything, is to just be in that moment of really hearing everything for the first time,” he said by phone from New York. “It is actually a huge act of listening and concentration, moment by moment. My voice for this is absolutely at the service of putting across the text.”

The “this” he was referring to was Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b), which he was in New York to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic, in a staging by director Peter Sellars that has become a landmark in visionary programming since its 2010 debut. Sellars’s version – a “ritualization,” as he calls it – is both abstract and charged with meaning, retelling the story of Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion in a way that connects its ancient roots to a contemporary sense of existential urgency.

Padmore has sung the Evangelist’s role hundreds of times, in both the St. Matthew Passion and St. John Passion (BWV 245). DVDs of those productions – Matthew released in 2012 and John just last month – provide potent evidence of Padmore’s ability to transcend the limits of objective narration. In the St. Matthew Passion, the Evangelist becomes the visual center, drawing to himself the characters’ sorrow and scorn as he lies on a coffin-like box in the center of the stage. In the St. John Passion, he stares with sad disbelief at the chorus’s hunger for Jesus’ crucifixion. Throughout both works, his piercing blue eyes could tell the story on their own.

Performing Bach in this way exacts a substantial effort, Padmore explained. “I don’t have any time off in these performances,” he said. “I simply have to follow and be there and be participating, because I think that helps the audience to do the same. If I take time out, then the audience can also relax and allow themselves to just sort of listen to beautiful playing. But if I’m there, really attentive, then I think there’s a kind of a contract that we make: The audience has to do the same.

“I’ve very rarely encountered someone who speaks about the theology or about the meaning of the text,” he said of Sellars. “And I believe that, whatever your religious belief or no religious belief, it’s a piece that should get under your skin. You should not just be able to listen to it and say, this is a beautiful piece of music.”

At one point, Padmore explained that part of what makes the Sellars “ritualizations” of the Passions so successful is their radical ability to strip away a listener’s previous encounters with those pieces, urging them to experience the music without any prehistory. Likewise, Padmore’s ambition, regardless of the piece he is performing, is to help audiences shed preconceptions and allow them to encounter a work afresh.

“One of the problems with classical music repertoire in general is that we tend to know it, often from a favorite recording,” he explained. “And then there’s a danger that people will listen to this music as almost a sort of aide-memoire in performance, and just sort of say, ‘It sounds like the recording I love,’ or, ‘It’s slightly different and a bit annoying.’ But it’s always in relation to memory. And I think in a way what this performance tries to do is to make it something where you forget all of that, you actually live it for the first time.”

David Weininger – The Boston Globe

Some Summertime Bach

30 Friday May 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Music Education, Other Artists

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Albuquerque, American Bach Soloists, Annandale-on-Hudson, Antonín Dvořák, Aston Magna, Bartók, Beethoven, Berkshire Choral Festival, Brahms, Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Buxtehude, Cape Ann, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Carmel Bach Festival, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Caroline Shaw, cello, Chamber Music Northwest, Chamberfest Cleveland, Chanticleer, Charles Ives, Chelsea Music Festival, clarinet, Cleveland, Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, Concord Sonata, David del Tredici, David Lang, David Shifrin, Derek Bermel, Detroit, Dream of Gerontius, Elgar, Emerson Quartet, Frederic Chiu, Ghost Opera, Gloria, Goldberg Variations, Great Barrington, Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Handel, Haydn, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Helmuth Rilling, Imani Winds, James Ehnes, James Tocco, Jeremy Denk, Kevin Puts, Kodály, Magnificat, Marc Neikrug, marimba, mass, Mass in B minor, Matthew Halls, Monica Huggett, Monteverdi, Mozart, New York, opera, Oregon Bach Festival, organ, Osvaldo Golijov, passion, Paul Jacobs, Paul Schoenfield, Paul Watkins, Pergolesi, Philip Glass, piano, Portland, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Prokofiev, Pulitzer Prize, Requiem, Rockport Chamber Music Festival, San Francisco, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Santa Fe, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Schubert, Schumann, Seattle Chamber Music Society, St. John Passion, St. Mark Passion, Strauss, Tan Dun, The New York Times, violin, Vivaldi, Vivian Schweitzer, Yefim Bronfman

SummercropCALIFORNIA

AMERICAN BACH SOLOISTS FESTIVAL San Francisco, 11-20 July 2014. Held at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the lineup this year features music by composers who influenced Bach, including Vivaldi, Pergolesi and Buxtehude; highlights of other programs are Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato and Bach’s Mass in B minor (BWV 232).

CARMEL BACH FESTIVAL Carmel-by-the-Sea, Monterey, Pebble Beach and Salinas, 19 July through 2 August 2014. Bach naturally figures prominently here. On opening night his Magnificat (BWV 243) and Vivaldi’s Gloria (reflecting this year’s Italian theme) will be programed alongside a work commissioned from the young Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw.

MASSACHUSETTS

ASTON MAGNA Great Barrington and Waltham, and Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 19 June through 19 July 2014. This early-music festival offers period-instrument programs including a celebration of C. P. E Bach’s three-hundredth birthday and a concert featuring Italian trio sonatas and a new work by Nico Muhly.

BERKSHIRE CHORAL FESTIVAL Sheffield, 13 July through 3 August 2014. This festival is proof that amateur choral singing continues to thrive, as eager singers arrive from around the country for an intense period of study and performances. Their efforts will culminate in performances led by professional musicians of Brahms’s Requiem, Bach’s St. John Passion (BWV 245) and Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius.

ROCKPORT CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL Cape Ann, 6 June through 13 July 2014. An estimable roster of musicians will play here, including the Emerson and Borromeo String Quartets. Jeremy Denk will perform Bach’s Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) and Ives’s Concord Sonata. The lineup also features a concert for clarinet and marimba and performances by Chanticleer and the Imani Winds.

MICHIGAN

GREAT LAKES CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL Detroit, 14-29 June 2014. Bach is in the spotlight this year and the pianist James Tocco has programed an appealing array of repertory favorites and contemporary works. The pianist Frederic Chiu will juxtapose music by Bach and Philip Glass and the cellist Paul Watkins, the festival’s artistic director designate, will join Mr. Tocco for Brahms’s Sonata for Piano and Cello no. 1.

NEW MEXICO

SANTA FE CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL Santa Fe and Albuquerque, 20 July through 25 August 2014. The pianist Yefim Bronfman is artist in residence at this festival, nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He will play a solo recital of Prokofiev and Marc Neikrug; other highlights include a Bach series; new works by Lowell Liebermann and Brett Dean; and performances by Alessio Bax, Ran Dank and Sasha Cooke.

NEW YORK

BRIDGEHAMPTON CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL 30 July through 24 August 2014. Concerts in various spots in Long Island’s East End include piano quartets by Brahms, Dvořák and Schumann; a premiere by Howard Shore; recent works by Kevin Puts, Gabriel Kahane and Evan Ziporyn; and Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor (BWV 1043). Performers include Brooklyn Rider and the pianists Gilles Vonsattel, Shai Wosner and Joyce Yang.

CHELSEA MUSIC FESTIVAL New York City, 6-14 June 2014. The German-Brazilian theme this year is inspired by the anniversaries of Richard Strauss, Villa-Lobos and C. P. E. Bach. The multigenre concerts, held at various galleries and institutes and often intertwined with visual and culinary themes, feature ensembles including the Sirius Quartet and premieres by composers including Augusta Read Thomas.

OHIO

CHAMBERFEST CLEVELAND Cleveland, 19-29 June 2014. It’s never too early to celebrate an anniversary: This festival toasts its third birthday with a spotlight on music for trios, with works by Haydn, Kodály, Schumann, Beethoven, Kevin Puts and Paul Schoenfield, as well as an arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for string trio. Also on the lineup is a new take on Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera.

OREGON

CHAMBER MUSIC NORTHWEST Portland, 23 June through 27 July 2014. David Shifrin, the clarinetist and artistic director, has programmed a wide range of repertory, including Mozart’s Quintet in A Major, for which he will join the Emerson Quartet. The lineup also includes the premiere of Stephen Hartke’s piano sonata for four hands by Anna Polonsky and Orion Weiss; Sasha Cooke singing Mozart, Bach and Schubert; and music by David del Tredici and Osvaldo Golijov.

OREGON BACH FESTIVAL Portland, Bend, Ashland, Corvallis, Florence and Eugene, 26 June through 13 July 2014. Matthew Halls, who succeeds Helmuth Rilling as artistic director, commemorates his debut season with the Monteverdi Vespers; Bach’s St. Mark Passion (BWV 247); a solo recital by the pianist Gabriela Montero; a performance by the organist Paul Jacobs; and Monica Huggett leading the Portland Baroque Orchestra. Mr. Rilling returns to conduct Mozart’s Requiem and Symphony no. 40.

WASHINGTON

SEATTLE CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY 7 July through 2 August 2014. The violinist James Ehnes is the music director here. Programming features a strong roster of musicians – including Augustin Hadelich, Richard O’Neill, Edward Arron, Inon Barnatan and Anthony McGill – performing music by Bach, Beethoven, Bartók, Derek Bermel and David Lang.

Vivian Schweitzer – The New York Times

Bach Psychology

17 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Books, Films, Other Artists, Video Recordings

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Alzheimer's disease, Archiv Produktion, aria, Bach: The Learned Musician, Beethoven, Brahms, British Broadcasting Corporation, Busoni, cantata, Cantata Pilgrimage, cantor, Caravaggio, CD, Chaconne in D minor, Charles Ives, Chopin, Christoph Wolff, computer, concerto, counterpoint, dance, Davitt Moroney, deafness, dynamics, Eisenach, emotions, English Baroque Soloists, Eric Siblin, First World War, Freud, fugue, Giulio Cesare, Glenn Gould, Handel, Hannibal Lecter, harmony, hermeneutics, Holy Roman Empire, Johan Huizinga, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, John Butt, John Eliot Gardiner, Joseph Kerman, Kapellmeister, Leipzig, Leopold Stokowski, liturgical year, Los Angeles Review of Books, Magnificat, Mahler, Martin Geck, Martin Luther, Masaaki Suzuki, Mass in B minor, Mendelssohn, mental health, metaphysics, Michael Markham, Modernism, Mondrian, Monteverdi Choir, Mozart, Music in the Castle of Heaven, Nadia Boulanger, National Geographic Magazine, NBC Radio Orchestra, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Oedipus, Ohrdruf, opera, Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique, Otto Klemperer, Palestrina, Passacaglia in C minor, passion, Paul Elie, performance practice, Peter Williams, Philippe Herreweghe, psychology, Pythagoras, Rachmaninoff, radio, Reinventing Bach, Rembrandt, rhythm, Richard Taruskin, Robert L. Marshall, Romanticism, rubato, Schumann, Second World War, serialism, Sharbat Gula, Sigiswald Kuijken, Sodom, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, Steve McCurry, Stravinsky, Susan McClary, tautology, Telemann, tempo, The Silence of the Lambs, Thirty Years War, Thuringia, timbre, tone color, transcription, Trinity Sunday, vibrato, Vivaldi, Wagner, Wilhelm Furtwängler, YouTube

PsychologycropThere is an unofficial marker in the timeline of canonical classical music. It falls around 1800, during Beethoven’s lifetime, separating composers for whom biography matters to non-academic listeners from those for whom it doesn’t. It is assumed the listener needs to know about the lives of post-1800 composers: about the onset of Beethoven’s deafness and resulting feelings of alienation in order to understand the storming anger in his music, about Chopin’s sense of exile in order to properly feel the longing expressed in his, about Schumann’s struggles with mental illness in order to properly feel the spasms between passion and introversion in his, about Mahler’s faith and disillusionment in order to feel the weight of existential crisis in his. It grows out of our desire to find personal meaning in art, to find some message encoded in all those notes. We need to believe we know what our composers were about before we can trust that we’re receiving their ideas properly. To get it wrong is somehow to do them an injustice. It certainly simplifies the process of listening. We know, with Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Mahler, what sort of mood we are supposed to be in even before the music begins to play. But it also simplifies and often distorts the historical record, reducing the complicated lives of our heroes to a series of mythological icons. Elsewhere in this publication [Los Angeles Review of Books], I’ve wondered if this is a problem worth worrying over: “A thousand battalions of Mozart scholars cannot erase the image of Miloš Forman’s Amadeus. But should they try?” With the publication of John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, a new quasi-biography of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), we’re situated comfortably on the other side of the 1800 line, back during the musical “Baroque” where we have a chance to see the problem at its thorniest, focusing on the composer who proves its most difficult test case.

For today’s classical music audiences one of the most problematic aspects of music before circa 1800 is answering the simple question “why did they make this piece of music I’m about to listen to?” The answers, for Beethoven and all composers succeeding him are comfortably familiar: Music is testimony of the self or the world of the self. It is done for Art (capital A), for the Inner Spirit, for the memory of the persecuted, to expose the existential anxiety of it all, etc. The early Romantics reached back a little bit and quickly salvaged Mozart (who, after all, should have lived to see 1800) by projecting testimony back onto him – of Oedipal strife and a difficult personality – fairy tales that still make up his mythic badge (“drunken child savant”), providing a framework for listeners to have satisfying emotional experiences when listening to him. But further beyond the wall mythology gets more difficult. As entertaining as Vivaldi’s music is, and as intense as his life may have been, who seeks out his music to experience the artistic integrity of his personal testimony? No one cares what Palestrina’s relationship with his father was like, or whether or not Handel believed in authoritarian order when he wrote Giulio Cesare. So much of the daily reality surrounding the music of the more distant past gives us less heartfelt, less Romantic, less personally-resonant answers to the question “why do it?” (for the King, for the paycheck, for the Pope’s pleasure cruise) that the profundity of the music can seem to suffer for its lack of subjective, creative angst that we seem to crave and they perhaps did not.

Thus much pre-1800 music is today relieved of being much more than “mood” music. Our approach to the music of the Renaissance, for instance, often becomes caught in a circular logic that keeps us at a distance. It is beautiful, yes? It is expressive, yes? And so what does it express? Beauty. And why is it beautiful? Because it is so expressive. But what does it express? . . . and on and on. The music of the Baroque, on the other hand, often represents extreme emotional states. It is not, however, the conduit of the composer’s own feelings, but of the “official” emotional posture required for whatever event, patron, institution or (for the opera) story they were writing. Emotional states, during the enlightenment, were just another natural phenomenon to be illustrated and represented, like winds or water or birdsong. As Joseph Kerman put it “Baroque composers depict the passions. Romantic composers express them.” The idea of personal expression had to wait for a few big cultural rifts. First, the freeing of composers from the Ancien Régime system of patrons and institutions, making them independent artists following no one’s taste but their own or their public’s. Second, the Napoleonic cult of the individual commanding that the artist, no less than the philosopher, look inward. As Johann Gottlieb Fichte pitched the new Romantic creed in 1792: “Turn your gaze away from all around you, and inwards on to yourself.” Once again, Mozart and Beethoven were the earliest prototypes of the new musical artist who would not or could not submit to the whims of church or aristocratic patronage and who instead struck out on their own, misfits, outlaws, non-conformists misunderstood by their era. This is all as much mythology as history, a plotline we internalized so long ago it will likely never be shaken.

And so biography for Pre-Romantic composers has often seemed superfluous to the experience of listening – merely academic, and usually pretty hopeless. Among the pre-1800 masters, Bach biography in particular is a prickly and thankless calling. It requires one to fuss endlessly over minor details, or at least to pretend to. It entails teasing phantom details from in-between precious few lines of actual primary sources, most of which are notoriously dull and legalistic. It requires you to do this while knowing that these same precious few, dull, legalistic sources have already been pored over by dozens of prior adherents to produce dozens of contradictory hagiographies and incompatible mythologies leaving us little more than a name-symbol accompanied by a jumble of tepid modifiers. To Christoph Wolff‘s recent Bach: The Learned Musician, we can add a few more alternately dismissed or embraced by Gardiner: the “exemplary Teuton,” the “working-class hero-craftsman,” the “bewigged, jowly old German Capellmeister,” the “incorrigible cantor.” If none of these monikers sounds terribly appealing or particularly dramatic to you, as opposed to say, Beethoven: The Stormy Napoleonic Revolutionary, or Mahler: The Disillusioned Neurotic Spiritualist, then you are starting already to see another problem with Bach biography. When you combine the stubborn refusal of the historical record to yield much of anything tantalizing, the expectation that none of it makes it into his music anyway, and the cowing complexity of that music, the end result is not a familiar emotional character-type but a cold distance, a sense that he and his world are unreachable and irrelevant to the listening experience. Yet Bach receives more biographical attention than any composer before Mozart and remains his chief rival for sheer quantity. Unlike the other canonic masters, the popularity of Bach studies shows no sign of letting up. The early twenty-first century has already seen more attempts to figure him out, of both the strict academic variety (along with Christoph Wolf’s biography, there are substantial essays and monograms by Robert L. Marshall, Peter Williams, and John Butt) and user-friendly “crossover” variety (Davitt Moroney, Martin Geck, Paul Elie, Eric Siblin) than any of the other candidates, including those like Mozart and Beethoven whose source material is richer in detail and drama. This mania for redundant parsing of the same scant material remains an unusual situation. Understanding it is key to figuring out what, if anything, Gardiner’s attempt has to offer.

His goal, on one hand, is humanization, to bring Bach closer to us. And, having throughout his life as a conductor absorbed any and all research on his favorite composer, he acknowledges many of the problems:

Even to his most ardent admirers Bach can seem a little remote at times: his genius as a musician – widely acknowledged – is just too far out of reach for most of us to comprehend. But that he was a very human human being comes across in all sorts of ways: not so much from the bric-à-brac of personal evidence such as family letters and first-hand descriptions, which are few and far between, but from chinks in his musical armour-plating, moments when we glimpse the vulnerability of an ordinary person struggling with an ordinary person’s doubts, worries and perplexities.

The anxiously modified tautology “he was a very human human being . . . ” gives you some sense of what Gardiner fears he is up against. More than any other composer, Bach illustrates the problem of articulating the emotional mechanisms of music. There is a long tradition of disappointing hermeneutics lurking there. The mainstream of Bach reception has been characterized by a frustrating poetic reticence, a dissonance between strong claims that his music is emotive and deeply moving coupled with a refusal or inability to identify the source of that emotion in terms other than its exhaustiveness or its impressive contrapuntal achievement. The poetic potential of his music is usually tied to its stylistic breadth and technical complexity, an exercise in the monumental and the logical, which impresses only insofar as it remains aloof from emotional particularity. That distance has proven useful. The vagueness of those powerful emotions everyone claims to feel, their being tied to something so seemingly unnameable, has allowed each generation to remake Bach in whatever image suits them. It is, in other words, what makes possible that most ubiquitous and banal claim about Bach’s music: that it is “Universal.” That cardinal cliché is difficult for any biographer of a “great” to avoid, and Gardiner is no exception, finding in Bach’s sacred music, “a universal message of hope that can touch anybody regardless of culture, religious denomination or musical knowledge.”

Such platitudes, of course, tell us nothing except how easy it has been to renew Bach’s music decade by decade. As anyone surveying the last hundred years will realize, and as Paul Elie pointed out last year in his Reinventing Bach, the twentieth century belonged to the miraculous Leipzig cantor. While other composers had their moments, and the center of the concert hall canon might seem to tilt every so often between earlier and later Romantics, by the beginning of the twentieth century it had been decided that Bach would always stand as the monad, the font, the Grossvater of us all. The image of Bach as prototype has been a cultural obsession since the 1830s when the Romantics first rediscovered his great settings of The Passion of Christ. That revival, beginning with Felix Mendelssohn’s historic performance of the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b) in 1829, the first time it had been heard since Bach’s own lifetime, succeeded in doing two things for Mendelssohn’s generation: it extended the German canon back a century, proving that “deep” music had always been a Teutonic thing, and it made a literal merger between Art and Religion for a generation that increasingly saw the concert hall as a site for their most spiritual and philosophical experiences.

Since that moment, Bach has been the official center of gravity that binds together the musical universe. It’s not an empty honorific. “In Bach,” according to Mahler, “the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God.” For Brahms his music represented “a whole world of the deepest thought and most powerful feeling.” The nineteenth century turned his off-putting complexity and biographical distance into a mechanism for confronting the sublime, that ultimate proof of Romantic ideals. Whether it was the tangle of a solo keyboard fugue, or the glacial face of the opening chorus in the St. John Passion (BWV 245), his music was a test, a mountain to be climbed so that one might, with pain and awe, glimpse and reach out to touch the highest possible points mortally attainable.

By the third decade of the twentieth century, the sublime had met up with the mass market mechanisms of radio and recording. His most famous works were packaged for maximum virtual mountaineering, the keyboard works played in lush, gargantuan transcriptions by the likes of Rachmaninoff and Busoni or clothed in the grandest garb of all, the oversized Wagnerian symphony orchestra. If the mountaintop is too far away, and too steep a climb, then the NBC Radio Orchestra would snip off the peak and send it to your living room where it would still seem plenty big. The transcriptions by Leopold Stokowski of works like the Chaconne (BWV 1004) for solo violin or the  Passacaglia and Fugue (BWV 582) for organ were gorgeous, plodding wooly-mammoths that marked a moment of maximal popularization for Bach: Gothic Bach, Unfathomable Bach. This was the Bach world that John Eliot Gardiner was born into and would eventually help to replace.

His career as a conductor of the Monteverdi Choir, The English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique falls squarely into a newer phase of Bach reception, an epochal shift in what Bach symbolized and eventually what he sounded like. This new Bach, the Bach that has reigned in the cultural imagination for the last seventy-five years, which musicologist Susan McClary has dubbed “Pythagorean” Bach, emerged as part of the stark turn away from Romanticism following World War I. The modernist rejection of “subjectivity” and personal psychological confessionals in art led to something of a downfall for Wagner, Mahler, and most of the great nineteenth-century Romantics. But the disillusioned post-war avant-garde found intellectual solace in the alienating distance between Bach and the human. Unlike Wagner, and Beethoven, and Schumann, Bach was untainted by personal psychology and corruptible human desire. He again benefited from having no historical personality, seeming to float above it all in a positivistic paradise where music and number intersected free of the original sin of emotion. His difficult and seemingly flawless counterpoint could serve as a crucible for what mattered in the years of Modernist formalism: Truth, objectivity, incorruptible processual integrity. The chores of complicated composing rules seemed to the modernists the best protection from backsliding into old bad (read: Romantic) habits. For Stravinsky, Bach’s fugues were “a pure form in which the music means nothing outside of itself.” Even as multiple generations or artists turned for comfort to the play of abstract forms, Bach managed to remain the center of the musical universe.

Even the radical post-World War II composers of total serialism, chance music, and computer music could not fault the pristine precision of his counterpoint. Gothic Bach had given way to Harmony-of-the-Spheres Bach, a different kind of metaphysics, but one no less rooted in the sublime – The Mathematical Sublime. Think no further than the close bond between Bach and Glenn Gould, that next great mythic icon of modernist detachment. To twist Gardiner’s tautology, Gould was one of the least human human beings to have ever been. Like everyone else, he found himself in Bach, imagining him as an artist “withdrawing from the pragmatic concerns of music-making into an idealized world of uncompromised invention.” This, of course, is precisely what Gould did in 1964 when he retired from live performance to concentrate his efforts exclusively within the precision-bubble of the recording studio, freed from the concert hall and its stink of the human and the social. Gould, too, is now central to our mythology of artist types and, in the popular imagination, Bach has remained the music for that type: esoterics and ascetics and Beautiful Minds. It is the music to which Hannibal Lecter plans his meticulous escape in The Silence of the Lambs. It is the music obsessively plinked out by the father of Allison Janney’s character on The West Wing, of course a mathematician, of course seeking structure through the spreading disorder and isolation of Alzheimer’s Disease. Music, Math, and Discipline. Clarity, Structure, and Complexity.

It is necessary to revisit Bach’s complicated reception history because it is out of all of this that Gardiner hopes to bring back to human form his “very human human being.” It is a tall order, and a motivation one may not immediately trust considering how much Gardiner’s own recordings have helped to solidify the modernist view. As he relates it in Music in the Castle of Heaven, he experienced that version of Bach early on in his studies with Nadia Boulanger who preached the Stravinskyan catechism of discipline and order: “She insisted that the freedom to express yourself in music, whether as a composer, conductor or performer, demanded obedience to certain laws.” His own recordings, part of the wave of “historically informed” interpretations using original instruments and claiming to resurrect the performing styles of Bach’s own era, have come to define the sound of Bach for the current generation of listeners. Those initial claims to “authentic reconstruction” have long been put aside, and we have (most of us) come to admit that we like this sound not for its historical authenticity but for how well it matches up with our own Mondrian-esque view of Bach: sleekness, clarity, momentum, almost superhuman precision (with Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir often at tempos that take the breath right out any mere humans foolish enough to try and sing along). Gardiner’s interpretations are only the most successful of an entire generation of conductors (along with those of Sigiswald Kuijken, Phillipe Herreweghe, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and Masaaki Suzuki among others) whose sound lays bare the abstract lines in Bach’s counterpoint by eliminating all of the distractions of older, Romantic performing styles: too much vibrato, too much rubato, too much dynamic swelling, not to mention too many performers. It would be impossible to overestimate how important Gardiner’s recorded legacy is to contemporary Bach reception. As novel and shocking as his recordings may have seemed to my own teachers who grew up on Otto Klemperer and Wilhelm Furtwängler, I am just young enough that his 1990 Mass in B minor (BWV 232) recording on Archiv was the first I heard, as was his St. Matthew Passion, and most revelatory to me, his recording of Bach’s Magnificat (BWV 243a). Today, for my students, Gardiner’s Bach is “normal” Bach, and those earlier conductors seem shocking, impossibly foreign, as from a lost and bizarre era.

The book, then, surprises. Given this reputation for clarity and precision, it is surprising that Gardiner’s inner dialog with the composer is such a humanely messy concoction of the spiritual and the psychological. One wonders if the motivation for the book is not to provide something of a correction to his own public reception. That a great performer may look back on his career and fear that everyone has missed his point all along must be daunting. Though one suspects that the thirty-year-old Gardiner, caught up in the heady days when the “authentic performance movement” was laying siege to record labels, might have written a different book. Much of Gardiner’s current view seems to have been born of the extraordinary project he undertook in 2000, dubbed the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. While hardly as austere an experience as the name implies (it was backed by a major record label and documented by a BBC camera crew), it was still a powerful testament to our continuing Bach obsession – a full year spent living life as an itinerant cantor, moving from one church to another throughout Europe, preparing and rehearsing two complete, often unfamiliar, Bach cantatas each week along with a number of other Bach monuments, some two hundred total pieces of difficult music all conforming to the liturgical calendar that was the composer’s own constantly ticking task master. That intensity of focus, of having one’s international conducting career turned for a year into the comparably claustrophobic vocation of Lutheran cantor, in short the pretense of “walking in the composer’s shoes,” seems to have shaken loose a lot in Gardiner. He speaks of it like an evangelist bringing back answers from the desert:

Following Bach’s seasonal and cyclical arrangement of cantatas for an entire year provided us with a graphic musical image of the revolving wheel of time to which we are all bound . . . solving the enigma of how this music brimming over with vigour and fantasy could have emerged from beneath the wig of that impassive-looking cantor . . .

The punishing pace of creativity and the picturesque settings seem to have provoked a sort of vision quest, part time-travel fantasy and part genuine insight into how distant a figure as Bach might actually be. It is no surprise, then, that the most satisfying sections of the book are those where Gardiner lets us into that inner dialog by reconstructing his thoughts during moments when he is swimming in the music during rehearsal or performance. Some of this talk is very much in line with the Pythagorean orthodoxy:

to convey what it feels like to be in the middle of it – connected to the motor and dance rhythms of the music, caught up in the sequential harmony and the intricate contrapuntal web of sounds, their spatial relations, the kaleidoscopic colour-changes of voices and instruments . . . the way it exposes to you its brilliant colour spectrum, its sharpness of contour, its harmonic depth, and the essential fluidity of its movement and underlying rhythm.

So far so Gould: sequences, spatial relations, colors, contours, lines. But as the book progresses, Gardiner reveals another layer of his current thinking about the composer, through both his perspectives on those same dull primary sources, which unfortunately he chooses to revisit in great detail, and through his favorite individual passages of the cantatas and Passions, which happily he does in just as much detail. The biographical half of the book shines in those sections when he imaginatively recreates the feel of the places Bach lived, penning him in a much smaller and uglier world than one might wish to imagine. Gardiner’s biographical Bach is impressively small: not a German but a Thuringian, not part of a Lutheran community but part of a family-clan, not a citizen of the Enlightenment but an overworked and alternately obsequious and litigious crank mired in the petty squabbles of provincial town life. Remote from the big thinking that usually makes up the intellectual context of Baroque studies, Bach’s world as presented by Gardiner is decidedly un-sublime. While far too conjectural in its details to be taken as an authoritative biography, it is a welcome antidote to the sweeping historical movements which usually serve as the “context” of important artist’s lives: The Enlightenment, The Baroque, The Holy Roman Empire. Bach’s world is too small for such big frames. Gardiner usefully reminds us that it is entirely possible to live “in the Enlightenment” without knowing it or showing many signs of it. It is a common sense point that some academic writers of epistemological “top-down” history might heed more often.

With a Huizinga-esque flair, Gardiner depicts Bach’s milieu in terms calculated to pull him off the mountaintop of “pure music.” From the rough and tactless scrounging required of preceding generations of the great “Bach Clan” to survive the gray landscape of the Thirty Years War (“the malaise which through most of the previous century had blighted the struggles of their parents’ and grandparents”), to Bach’s own dingy coming of age in the brutish boy’s schools of Eisenach and Ohrdruf with their Caravaggiesque gangs of knife-wielding ruffians (“brawls . . . [that] . . . developed unchecked while the burghers stood by, impotently wringing their hands . . . [over the] territorial division of the town between these embryonic Jets and Sharks or Mods and Rockers”), all the way to the petty arguments that made up much of his life in a Leipzig run by “a formidable alliance of secular and religious powers whose methods of subjugating employees had been honed over time and who were expert at making life difficult . . .,” Gardiner shows a consistent flair for the drab and depressing.

As in Huizinga’s history writing, the rough detail in this portrait of a querulous, often petty cantor and his dour world is meant to shock and alienate the reader. In breaking the composer out of his abstract cocoon, Gardiner also manages to break down the stereotype of the detached ascetic inhabiting a world of pure intellect. But that distance, once achieved, and the reader’s predictable recoil from the grubby reality offered up, is actually just a step toward Gardiner’s next goal, to locate in Bach some basis for a tragic persona that can serve as a framework for reading his works psychologically and autobiographically. The goal is not without merit. For listeners, it promises a renewed emotional resonance between we moderns and Bach’s sacred music that goes beyond the old saws of purity or complexity. The tactics, however, are predictable and problematic. To pull Bach, and only Bach, across the 1800 wall and into the world of authentic testimony, Gardiner needs to pick and choose when to allow him to be a very human human being living in his very small human world, and when to allow him the luxury of transcending that world in order to communicate his “universal” message. It is a difficult needle to thread.

The Bach that emerges is heavily marked by that rougher, darker setting. But the resulting scars are arranged into a familiar pattern, that of the romantic outsider. He is orphaned, death-obsessed, outlaw, non-conformist, a sullen misfit. He is “battle scarred” from disputes with both civic and court authorities, scars that include the memory of imprisonment and the threat of destitution. He rejected the career path of his more successful contemporaries toward the soulless but profitable theater music of larger urban centers out of pure artistic integrity (“not from any Lutheran prudery but simply because the music he heard there left him cold”). Instead he propagated “mutant” musical forms that were largely misunderstood by his own audiences and bosses. He is set upon by smaller musical minds who question his lack of a university education. Thus even Bach, the supreme technician (and posthumous terrorizer of conservatory students the world over), is able to fill the Romantic role of the unschooled, or at least un-institutionalized, outsider. He stands alone as a complex psychological figure among a collection of shallow and imperious straw men: despots, bureaucrats, venal patrons, abusive pedagogues, jealous academics, frivolous popular composers (Telemann serves as the main foil here), and audiences craving easy delights. Bach alone is allowed the luxury of introspection and depth because Bach alone is tasked with having something important to say to us directly. The personal flaws of this “imperfect man” selected for our inspection are consistently of the anti-hero variety. He is, in short, every bit the visionary and martyr we’ve come to expect from artistic hagiography. The process is completed when Gardiner makes the final turn so familiar to us from our side of the 1800 wall, revealing that the ultimate primary source for Bach’s biography is the testimony of “the music itself.”

The music gives us shafts of insight into the harrowing experiences he must have suffered as an orphan, as a lone teenager, and as a grieving husband and father. They show us his fierce dislike of hypocrisy and his impatience with falsification of any sort; but they also reveal the profound sympathy he felt towards those who grieve or suffer in one way or another, or who struggle with their consciences.

Much of this is merely an extension of the call made over ten years ago by Robert L. Marshall for bolder attempts at Bach Biography. There is much resonance between Gardiner’s portrait of Bach and Marshall’s suggested method, to extend back to Bach the posthumous Freudian couch sessions practiced so provocatively (and questionably) by Maynard Solomon in his biographies of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Both Marshall and Gardiner fixate on Bach’s experience of loss. Marshall goes so far as to posit that an obsession with death and human frailty, not to mention a deep attraction to Lutheran orthodoxy, might be explained as a retreat from the anxiety of being twice orphaned, first by parental death, and then by brotherly abandonment. It is a method that requires inflating poorly documented, sometimes partially guessed, bits of biographical detail with intense emotional consequences. Gardiner’s musical analyses flow freely from this font. Simply put, Bach’s personal experience of loss, coupled with his fervent immersion in Lutheran doctrine, led him to a uniquely honest understanding of shame, of temptation, and of the desire for redemption. Such themes, of course, never go out of fashion and were staples as well of Baroque opera and of the sacred works of Vivaldi, Telemann, and scores of other composers. But Gardiner singles out Bach for an “authentic” religious conviction in contrast to the shallowness of his more theatrical contemporaries. To revisit and rewrite Kerman’s formula, “Baroque composers depict the passions . . . except for Bach, who expresses them.” One of us after all. This coupled with Bach’s unmatched willingness to forgo the beautiful and the pleasurable in favor of uncomfortable moments of pain, rage, and revulsion separates him from those others. At its best such diagnoses invest old music with a new and contemporary psychological power, a process that leaves one conflicted, offending the historian while stirring the concertgoer. Being both myself, I’ve long since learned to stop worrying and enjoy the resulting neurotics made out of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Ives, et al., and so I am fully prepared to do the same for Bach. But we should never forget who the patient on the couch really is.

Gardiner’s task is made easier by the predictability of the resulting trope. We all know the artist type that we expect to be born of such angst. The gateway from slim source material to mythological archetype is a bit like Platform Nine and Three-Quarters at King’s Cross Station. It will always be there for you if you run confidently enough at it. In Music in the Castle of Heaven, this dimension of testimonial expressivity remains Bach’s special prerogative among Baroque composers, a special status essential to the book’s final and most substantial argument, that among the music of that entire era Bach’s sacred vocal works are uniquely relevant to our modern condition.

Gardiner provides us two different vantage points on Bach’s testaments. Based on his experience during the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, he is the perfect guide to walk us through a diachronic survey of an entire year’s cycle. It is an ambitious analysis offering glimpses of a composer responding to the challenge of producing a new sacred composition every week – a complex of moving Rembrandtian musical portraits of humans in distress. For a few cantatas and for the two extant Passion settings he gives us extreme close-ups, visiting with each movement and scene at a level of detail that allows us to luxuriate in the conductor’s vision of his newer darker Bach. His reading of Christ Lag in Todesbanden (BWV 4) demonstrates the surprising zeal of a twenty-two-year-old’s commitment to Lutheran eschatology. The text and governing melody, harshly ritualistic and tribal, are by Luther himself.

No innocence could be found.
Thus it was that Death came so soon
And seized power over us –
Held us captive in his kingdom,
Alleluia!

Bach’s musical setting weeps, wails, and roars with striking realism even as it astounds in its intricate textures. The result is a grim reminder of how effective Luther’s language and Bach’s music can be at bringing abstract theological concerns down into the world of everyday mortality:

Timeframes overlap here: first that of pre-regenerate man, then those of the Thuringians of both Luther’s and Bach’s day, scarred by their regular brushes with pestilential death.

Gardiner uncovers (or injects) much that is new and worth the reader’s time. The St. John and St. Matthew Passion settings get particularly engaging analysis, fitting to their position in Gardiner’s view as the greatest example of music’s ability to mimic tragedy and to force passive listeners into a recognition of their culpability in the world they inhabit:

[they] . . . animate the conventions of tragic myth and tragic conduct . . . leading his listeners to confront their mortality and compelling them to witness things from which they would normally avert their eyes.

These close readings have a lot to offer. They are rich in technical detail for those that want that in a music book, and bold in their emotional lunges for those who will skip past the shop talk of rhythms and counterpoints. But Gardiner’s hope is for more than mere compellingness. It is for relevance. His book is a failure if it cannot frame Bach’s Passions as something more than historical artifacts of a proto-enlightenment. That is the reason he doesn’t go too far into that world before pulling up. Others have already delved farther into what Gardiner almost sheepishly calls “the delicate issue of religious belief,” questioning the ability of today’s audiences to connect to a music so deeply rooted in convictions that many of us do not share or may even outright reject. Richard Taruskin offers that if one digs far enough into the real historical Bach, one finds a worldview worth truly recoiling from, a world of enforced consensus, absolutist ideology, anti-individualism, misogyny, and small-minded bigotry: “pre-Enlightened – and when push came to shove, a violently anti-Enlightened–temper. . . . Such music was a medium of truth, not beauty, and the truth it served – Luther’s truth – was often bitter. . . . Even when Bach is not expressing actively anti-Enlightenment sentiments . . . his settings are pervaded with a general antihumanism.” This, according to Taruskin, is why “only a handful of Bach’s cantatas can be said to have really joined the modern performance repertory, and a thoroughly unrepresentative handful at that.”

Gardiner offers us some relief from that “abandon ship” position, coaxing us to dip a toe into real history, just enough to give us something more real than Pythagorean Bach or Mountaintop Bach, just enough to darken the mood a bit for audiences who like their music pathological but not demagogic. History, in Music in Castle of Heaven, is in the service of contemporary experience. It must bend to achieve Gardiner’s goal, which is to convince us that Bach’s sacred vocal music remains socially relevant. It contains, after all, vivid and relatable depictions of very human human beings at their most pathetic, guilty, ashamed, supplicating, desperate. Gardiner believes above all else that exposure to these works is good for us in a way that even Bach’s own instrumental music cannot match. Simply put, it fosters empathy:

although Bach is habitually required to deal with such towering universal themes as eternity, sin and death, he shows he is also interested in the flickers of doubt and the daily tribulations of every individual, recognising that small lives do not seem small to the people who live them.

The extent of this belief is on stark display on the CD covers to the recordings that coincide with the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage. Released by Gardiner’s own label, each CD features a photograph by Steve McCurry, best known for National Geographic’s famous cover photo of twelve-year-old Sharbat Gula. The CD covers all attempt to repeat the power of that iconic image, a single person staring directly at the camera and thus, challengingly, into the eyes of the listener/holder of the CD. What changes from photo to photo is ethnicity, gender, traditional clothing or makeup. Like Gula, known across America and Europe not by her name but by a reductive formula – “The Afghan Girl” – (direct object + ethnicity + gender = human), the people in the photographs are all easily reduced to interchangeable symbols of exoticness. They are ethnically and geographically diverse, with the notable absence being the white European or American that one might presume is Gardiner’s expected Bach CD purchaser. If their ethnicity does not establish their “otherness,” then their indigenous dress, makeup, or ceremonial posture certainly does – a cascade of very human humans, all very different than you. Shuffle the deck of humanity and buy the complete box set! It is easy to read this exercise as naively exploitative orientalism. But I am willing to give Gardiner the benefit of an earnest belief that these images press the same issue as the music, asking us to confront the ultimate test of empathy – distance. It is easy to feel for the person near you, or the person who most resembles you. The consequences of their suffering are clearer and closer. The true test is how compelled one is to act on behalf of someone far away, who does not resemble you, and who you will never meet. It is a bold and clumsy attempt to make a strong claim that Bach’s sacred music has powerful work to do still today, the highest order of work, of making the world a better place all the way from the private to the global:

for beleaguered humanity at all times and in all places – from instances of false accusation in private or domestic life to the outrages under regimes of torture.

Music in the Castle of Heaven seems meant to complete a triad: striking musical performances, provocative visual imagery, and now a book-length exploration of these works, step by step, psychological trauma by trauma. But this brings us back to where this essay began, prompting the question of why it requires so many pages of biographical backup? Why the need to establish that the message we receive from this astounding music is rooted in Bach’s own psyche and endorsed by his own intentions? Twenty years ago, during the great “authentic performance” debates, this same question was asked of performers like Gardiner who claimed “historical verisimilitude” as a justification for their new performance style rather than simply admitting that they played the way they wanted to because they (and we) liked the sound. Gardiner’s own rhetoric was called into question back then as an example of the poietic fallacy, the idea that the only, or most valid, meaning of a musical work is one derived from the composer’s own thought process. It is a habit that leads us to credit our own feelings to someone else – someone whose mind we cannot hope to read, but whose authority we crave – the composer or author as lawgiver. The debate is long settled so far as performance is concerned, and performers in the new style have (mostly) accepted that, as Taruskin sneakily commended them, “being the true voice of one’s time is . . . roughly forty thousand times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history.” But reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, it seems as if Gardiner, the author, learned nothing from the trials of Gardiner, the performer, or at least thought he might slip old habits by in another form.

Take for a final example his readings of Cantatas 178, 179, and 135, the texts of which center on spiritual hypocrisy (from BWV 178: “wicked men . . . conceiving their artful plots with the serpent’s guile” and from BWV 179: “Likeness of false hypocrites, We could Sodom’s apples call them, Who, with rot though they be filled, On the outside brightly glisten.”). The music is filled with strident, heavily articulated orchestral slicing, fiery long-winded chewing-outs for melodies, and unexpected harmonic thunderclaps. For Gardiner, the one thing that is missing is personal testimony:

such sustained defiance that one asks whether there is a submerged story here – of Bach operating in a hostile environment. How much more satisfying, then, for him to channel all that frustration and vituperative energy into his music. . . . This is superb, angry music executed with a palpable fury, with Bach fuming at delinquent malefactors. One can picture the city elders, sitting in the best pews, listening to these post-Trinitarian harangues, registering their intent and starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable as these shockingly direct words – and Bach’s still more strident and abrasive music – hit home.

Perhaps. Certainly the notion reinforces Gardiner’s own Bach mythology, Bach again as prototype, this time of the outsider anti-hero – proto-Beethoven. It is attractive. But whatever satisfying defiance this music parallels in modern listeners – anger at hypocritical corporate double-speak or outraged moralizing at ignorant power-wielding political hacks – is both self-evident in the sound and already built in to our cultural moment. It does not require the backing of Bach’s imaginary diary or visions of puffed-up Leipzig burghers.

In the end, the book is an argument for these difficult works to be kept alive, sprinkled with a fear that in our age of spiritual skepticism, and our new $.99/track digital music marketplace, Bach’s shorter instrumental works (and heaven forbid Vivaldi’s brilliant and breezily accessible concerti and arias) may be better built to thrive. But the case for relevance, and the call to keep the cantatas from fading, will be made between Bach’s music, his performers, and us. The answer to the question “why should we listen to this?” does not have to coincide with the answer to the question “why did he write it?”

If one has any doubts, look around at how many different Bachs are coexisting today, when more than a century of shifting performance styles and emotional perspectives are all streaming together on Youtube: Romantic Bach, Modern Bach, Gothic Bach, Pythagorean Bach, ascetic Bach, Lutheran Bach, audacious virtuoso Bach. You can choose whichever you’d like today, and a different one tomorrow. They all once claimed to be “the real” Bach – proof of how the process of reception is the history that matters. Just be aware, when reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, that John Eliot Gardiner’s tragic orphan-empath is only one Bach among those many. No more or less accurate to the “true” past, but perhaps more prepared to survive the immediate future.

Michael Markham – Los Angeles Review of Books

A Second, Rawer, Bout of Passion

04 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Works, Other Artists

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aria, baritone, bassoon, Berlin, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Berlin Radio Choir, Billy Budd, Brittin, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Camilla Tilling, Captain Vere, Carnegie Hall, chorale, chorus, Christian Gerhaher, continuo, emotions, flute, gesture, hymn, John Eliot Gardiner, lighting effects, Lincoln Center, Magdalena Kožená, Mark Padmore, mass, Music in the Castle of Heaven, New York, opera, Park Avenue Armory, passion, Peter Sellars, Philharmonie, recitative, Roderick Williams, Simon Halsey, Simon Rattle, soprano, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, string tone, tenor, The New York Times, Thomas Quasthoff, Topi Lehtipuu, violin, White Light Festival, woodwind, Zachary Woolfe

Camilla Tilling

Camilla Tilling and Mark Padmore

Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b) is contemplative, a study in suffering and transcendence. His St. John Passion (BWV 245) is tighter and more angular, a battlefield of action and reaction.

Matthew weeps and wonders while John, which the Berlin Philharmonic and its conductor, Simon Rattle, performed [last week] in a powerful new staging by Peter Sellars at the Philharmonie [in Berlin], presses forward. Matthew is a mass, John an opera.

But not quite. While our sense of Bach has deepened as scholars have learned more about the key role opera played in the world he inhabited, he chose never to write in the genre. It seems there was something he resisted about a form whose audience consumed art passively.

He created works, the Passions most of all, whose viewers are also, in a sense, participants, constantly questioning themselves and their perspective. For instance, the chorus enacting a mob of persecutors suddenly transforms into a huddled band of mourners.

In his 2010 staging of the St. Matthew Passion, Mr. Sellars showed a keen understanding of the status of these works as rituals rather than operas. It was a spare, haunting production that consisted physically of little more than dark clothes, simple gestures and some white blocks. The emphasis was on intense emotion and human connection, with close interaction between the instrumentalists and singers.

With the rich yet raw playing of the Philharmonic under Mr. Rattle, a moving cast of soloists and the incisive Berlin Radio Choir, the Matthew Passion was instantly a classic, a model of the convergence of music and spectacle that has become increasingly important in drawing people to orchestras. Released on DVD by the ensemble, the production will travel to New York in October for two performances at the Park Avenue Armory to open Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, the climax of a visit by the Philharmonic that also includes four concerts at Carnegie Hall.

The follow-up, Mr. Sellars’s St. John Passion, has been eagerly anticipated. Granted a luxurious amount of rehearsal and a nearly intact cast from the Matthew performances – only the great bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff is missing, and missed, having announced his retirement in 2012 – the simmering performance lives up to the high expectations.

Mr. Sellars’s touching stylization was better suited to the grief-stricken Matthew than the more stoic John, and the physical relationship he created between the orchestra and the other performers was more meaningful in that earlier production. But in John, he still created potent effects, pushing his soloists toward focused melancholy. He made the Berlin Radio Choir sprawl on the stage, crawl across it as a mass and, at one point, race to the corners of the Philharmonie to create a chilling sense of sonic immersion.

Visually there is even less to Mr. Sellars’s St. John Passion than his Matthew. The choral and instrumental forces of John are smaller, so the teeming feeling of the previous production is poignantly depleted. In lieu of the white blocks, there is just a hanging spotlight hovering a few feet above the center of the stage and, sometimes, a chair. The lighting changes starkly with each abrupt shift of mood.

Like the St. Matthew Passion, John tells the story of the end of Jesus’s life by an alternation of three elements: a dramatization in recitative of the biblical text, hymn-like chorales and reflective arias. But Mr. Sellars focuses intently in this John on the first of these, making truly central the three singers who voice Jesus, Peter/Pilate and, especially, the narrating Evangelist.

The Philharmonic was lucky to have once more the tenor Mark Padmore, one of the great Evangelists of our time, and superb here. A wandering witness to terrible events he helplessly recalls, he is a cousin of the shellshocked Captain Vere he portrayed in Britten’s Billy Budd at the Brooklyn Academy of Music a few weeks ago.

It seems reductive to pick out specific moments, like the sensitivity with which he described Peter warming himself, the majestic way he unfurled the word “weinete” (“wept”) or his soaring line after Jesus declares Pilate powerless. From his first word – “Jesus,” a microcosm of caring – Mr. Padmore’s performance was an integrated, unforgettable vocal and dramatic whole.

The baritone Roderick Williams’s voice rang out commandingly beneath a blindfold as Jesus, but it was a questionable choice to have him collapse at the chorus’s cries of “kreuzige” (“crucify”). The Jesus of the St. John Passion is not the suffering martyr of Matthew but calm and collected, a winner. We may identify less today with his confident reserve, but the contrast of that coolness with the others’ hysteria and pain gives the work meaning.

Contemporary audiences may feel more of a connection to the tormented Pilate, whom the thoughtful baritone Christian Gerhaher and Mr. Sellars have rendered as a well-meaning, weak-willed bourgeois functionary. Dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt open at the neck, he may be a lawyer or banker whose power derives from a structure that prevents him from doing good. His question to Jesus – “was ist Wahrheit?” (“what is truth?”) – was here a stunned expression of existential emptiness.

The soloists in the arias were less devastating. Magdalena Kožená’s soft-grained mezzo-soprano suited the earth-mother role she seemed to embody, with her thickly woven red gown and very obvious pregnancy. The soprano Camilla Tilling sounded committed, light and creamy, only turning tense at the very top of the voice. The only disappointment was the tenor Topi Lehtipuu, colorless and strained in his important arias.

Mr. Rattle conducted a performance that was lush yet energetic from the first downbeat, with warm balance between the strings and the winds. The sharp edge of the violins faced the ominous buzz of the bassoon as the chorus denied it had the ability to put Jesus to death, and the flute soloists were velvety in the aria Ich folge dir. The continuo players, who accompanied the recitatives, were dazzlingly unified with the singers in moments like Jesus’s declaration that his kingdom does not belong to this world.

The chorus, led by Simon Halsey, was particularly affecting in slower music, when the singers came together in great waves. Other passages could have been less polite: the cries of “kreuzige” even more terrifying and the horrifyingly jovial account of rolling dice for the distribution of Jesus’s tunic more grotesque.

But the work’s final sequence – a long, somber chorus followed by a shining hymn – left me full of the feeling that John Eliot Gardiner, in his recent study Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, writes is one thing we have when the St. John Passion is over: a pained, uneasy gratitude.

Zachary Woolfe – The New York Times

Bach on a Stick

28 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Works, Other Artists, Video Recordings

≈ 1 Comment

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Alan Curtis, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Bob van Asperen, Brandenburg Concertos, British Broadcasting Corporation, cantata, CD, computer, Das Alte Werk, DVD, Goldberg Variations, Gustav Leonhardt, harpsichord, headphones, Il Giardino Armonico, Kurt Equiluz, Mass in B minor, Milan, MP3, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, organ, passion, secular cantata, Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, Teldec, Ton Koopman

Bach memory stickIn 2000, Teldec issued its complete Bach edition on CD, made up of four decades of releases from its catalogue, as well as the Das Alte Werk labels. All the works were performed on period instruments and ranged from the earliest of the cantata recordings, dating from 1963, to those of some of the instrumental trios made in the late 1990s to plug the few gaps in the survey. It was an extraordinarily comprehensive achievement, which ran to 154 discs, including a DVD of a BBC documentary from its great composers series.

Now the whole set has been made available at a remarkably low price as more than three thousand MP3 files on a single memory stick, together with PDFs of essays from the original recordings, though not, as far as I could establish, the texts of the vocal works, even though there would have been plenty of space for them on the memory stick. As a concept alone, it’s pretty astonishing to be able to hold the whole life’s work of one of the greatest composers in the history of western music in the palm of one’s hand – but it would be only that, and the empty triumph of technology over artistic quality, if the results were not worthwhile both musically and technically.

On a musical level, certainly, there can be very few complaints. The core of the whole enterprise was always the pioneering set of the complete sacred cantatas: sixty CDs in the original set, on which Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt worked tirelessly with their ensembles for Das Alte Werk over more than twenty years. While those performances are sometimes a bit more strait-laced expressively than today’s much suaver period-instrument bands, there is a wonderfully uncomplicated directness about the singing and playing that is always fully engaged. Harnoncourt and Ton Koopman share the secular cantatas, while it’s the former’s performances for both the Passions – his outstanding 1970 version of the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244) and a slightly less convincing 1993 one of the St. John Passion (BWV 245), with Kurt Equiluz and Anthony Rolfe Johnson as the respective Evangelists – and for the Mass in B minor (BWV 232), from 1986, that are included.

Koopman also features extensively as an organist; his performances of the complete organ works are spread across sixteen CDs and recorded on a variety of instruments in the 1990s. As you would expect in such a purist set, all the remaining keyboard works are played on the harpsichord, shared between seven different soloists, including Leonhardt in his classic performance of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), Alan Curtis and Bob van Asperen. Leonhardt is the soloist, too, in the harpsichord concertos, while the Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-51) are represented by wonderful buoyant performances from the Milanese group Il Giardino Armonico. Among the instrumental music, Harnoncourt goes back to his beginnings as a string player in the Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12) and the Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord (BWV 1027-9), while Thomas Zehetmair plays the solo-violin works.

For this set, the original recordings have been compressed at a bit rate of 320 kbps. That is apparently the maximum quality that can be handled by domestic MP3 players, and the sound seems pretty good, though inevitably can seem restricted when compared with the CD originals. Alternatively the files can be downloaded and then burnt on to CD, though, that rather defeats the object of having them on a memory stick in the first place. Plugged into a computer and played back through high-quality headphones, though, the results are certainly acceptable, even if navigating your way around the 25GB of material is sometimes hit and miss – the search facility provided with the application isn’t terribly sophisticated, and so locating a particular chorale prelude, say, could take a while.

But riffling through 154 CDs to locate a specific track wouldn’t ever be straightforward either, and in the end it is the sheer quantity of music involved that makes the task a challenge. The accessibility and the miraculous compactness of this set are bound to be its huge selling point; as a handy work of reference, certainly, it’s hard to fault.

Andrew Clements – The Guardian

Chaplin Meets Bach

05 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Works, Films, Other Artists

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A Dog's Life, Bach Choir of Pittsburgh, Bob Karlovits, Charlie Chaplin, Christmas Oratorio, circus, City Lights, comedy, Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis, Jon Erik Schreiber, Magnificat, Mass in B minor, Modern Times, Orchestral Suite no. 3 in D Major, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, soundtrack, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, Suite no. 3 in B minor, The Kid, The Pawnshop, Thomas Wesley Douglas, Wachet auf ruft uns die Stimme

Charles Chaplin, left-handed cellist, in 1915

Charles Chaplin, a left-handed cellist, in 1915

Blending the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and the films of Charlie Chaplin seemed like a good idea until Thomas Wesley Douglas started working on it. “There were just so many times I said to myself, ‘What in the world are you doing?’” says Douglas, artistic director of the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh. The choir will present a program on 6 and 7 April called “Time Zones” that will use the music of Bach to provide a soundtrack of sorts to one full-length film and four shorts by Chaplin.

Not only is the melding of Bach and Chaplin odd, but so is the manner of the concert. It will be presented in Allegheny Academy on the North Side, but not in a usual concert shape. The intermission not only will divide the show but will provide the time for audience members to switch rooms to see the other half. Douglas and assistant conductor Jon Erik Schreiber each will conduct the different halves of the performance each night. Douglas says the site-swapping is simply an “experiment” in production, allowing the sections to take place in smaller settings and creating “the feeling of a circus, where there’s something going on elsewhere.”

Trimming the Bach pieces so they firmly fit in the Chaplin films is the toughest part of planning the show, Douglas says. Of course, it was not easy selecting the films, either, Douglas says. He watched about thirty films, trying to keep in mind Bach’s music and come up with combinations that worked.

The full-length film will be A Dog’s Life, while the four shorts will be from The Pawnshop, Modern Times, The Kid and City Lights. Each half will be about thirty-five minutes long. The music will be from the Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248), the St. John Passion (BWV 245), the Magnificat in D Major (BWV 243), the Mass in B minor (BWV 232), Orchestral Suite no. 3 in D Major (BWV 1068), Suite no. 3 in B minor (BWV 814), Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (BWV 21), Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 140), and the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244).

Douglas says he was prompted to combine the works of two seemingly dissimilar souls when he once heard a person mention Bach and comedy in a conversation. He says he allowed his stream of consciousness to run with the idea and came up with this show. “But it fits so well together because both men had so many resources in what they did,” he says.

Schreiber agrees, adding that in some ways their works fit well, because they are both telling stories indirectly: Chaplin without words and Bach with music. “Chaplin works in some ways resemble Bach’s in the ways they are put together so well,” he says. “It is remarkable how well he expresses himself without words.”

Bob Karlovits – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

The Mythical Lute Suites

18 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Bach's Works, Organology

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Adam Falckenhagen, Betrachte meine Seel', cello, Christiane Eberhardine, Classical Guitar Canada, clavichord, Clive Titmuss, continuo, guitar, Johann Christian Weyrauch, Komm süßes Kreuz, Lass Fürstin lass noch einen Strah, lute, Partita in E Major, Saxony, Sonata in A minor, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, Suite in G minor, transcription, Trauerode, viola d’amore, violoncello

Final page of BWV 996

Final page of BWV 996

Bach wrote effectively for the lute as a color instrument in several choral works. The bass aria Betrachte, meine Seel’ with lute, violas d’amore and continuo occurs at a crucial moment in the St. John Passion (BWV 245). In an early version of the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b), the aria Komm, süßes Kreuz includes a wonderfully written lute part. In the Trauerode Lass, Fürstin, lass noch einen Strahl (BWV 198), a funeral cantata for Christiane Eberhardine, Electress of Saxony, Bach wrote for two lutes. He capitalized on a historic archetype whenever he needed an evocation of the angelic, but his writing style in these cases – more like his cello writing – does not come even close to resembling what is claimed to have written by him for the lute.

Just because Bach may have written “pour la Luth” at the top of the page of the compositions known as the “Lute Suites” (BWV 995 and 996), we need not conclude that he had done it with any conviction. If Bach set out to write real lute music, and not keyboard music with annotation, he surely would have done better than the Suite in G minor (BWV 995). BWV 995 may be a stab at arranging an earlier work for the lute, but it is not lute music.

Bach arranged his own violin-to-harpsichord concerti, and he arranged portions of the violin Sonata in A minor (BWV 1003), in addition to the violin Partita in E Major (BWV 1006), for keyboard, perhaps specifically for a five-octave clavichord (a personal theory). Bach’s habit of borrowing from himself has led writers to making a case that Bach may have written various pieces for the lute in thin-textured style at relatively low pitch and, surrounded by capable exponents of the instrument, expected them to make the lute transcription. Two lutenists in his circle, Johann Christian Weyrauch and Adam Falckenhagen, arranged pieces in his stead, so the proposition that he expected others to make the proper adjustments to his compositions seems reasonable.

The problem with this train of thought is that it underestimates Bach’s professional capacity. Both lute and guitar require careful arrangement of the notes. The would-be lute composer must learn to flatter the instrument in just the right way. The style of lute music developed over hundreds of years; it was in its twilight during Bach’s lifetime. As he demonstrated with his use of the lute in liturgical works and the funerary cantata, for Bach, the lute was a special-effect instrument, not central to his style of composition. He had little motivation to dabble in such a circumscribed medium.

If Bach had really wished to write convincing lute music, as he demonstrated with his ensemble parts, he was more than able to do it. The speculation that he would leave his arranging to others seems far-fetched. Nevertheless, countless recordings for both guitar and lute have proposed relaxed editorial responsibility on Bach’s behalf.

Looking at the images of the music now, and comparing them with modern transcriptions of lute music of the period, it is difficult to imagine how anyone could ever have suggested that the “Lute Suites” may be lute music by Bach. In appearance on the page, everything about them, the notation itself, the use of the pen and the beaming, stem directions, the arrangement of clefs and the voice leading – it looks and feels like keyboard music.

Clive Titmuss – Classical Guitar Canada

Breakthrough on St. John Passion

12 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by Edward McCue in Audio Recordings, Bach's Life, Bach's Predecessors, Bach's Successors, Bach's Works, Other Artists

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aria, Beethoven, Buxtehude, chorale, chorale prelude, Dunedin Consort, Edinburgh, Eisenach, German, Glasgow University, Good Friday, hymn, Jesuit, John Butt, Kate Molleson, Leipzig, Linn Records, liturgy, Martin Luther, motet, opera, organ, passion, Präludium in F-sharp minor, Richard Holloway, sermon, St. John Passion, St. Matthew Passion, St. Nicholas Church, symphony, television, The Herald

JohnpassioncropEvery so often a performance comes along that is so novel, so radical, that it triggers an entire paradigm shift in the way we understand the great cornerstones of classical music. Sometimes that novelty comes down to emotional daring or sheer virtuosity; sometimes it’s an academic argument that’s too persuasive to be ignored. The new recording of Bach’s St. John Passion (BWV 245) from Professor John Butt and his Edinburgh-based Dunedin Consort might just be one of the latter.

The St. John Passion was never meant for the concert hall: it was first performed to a thousand-strong congregation crammed into Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church on Good Friday, 1724. The only opera house in town had closed a couple of years earlier, and Bach played to the crowd’s appetite with arias of lurid emotionality and testing virtuosity. He never did write an opera, but he knew full well all the tricks of the trade.

The Passion music lasts for two hours, about a third shorter than Bach’s later St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244), but it wasn’t the whole story back in 1724. Butt has reconstructed the original Good Friday Vespers liturgy, framing Bach’s score with organ preludes, congregational chorales, motets and prayers. There’s even a selection of sermons available to download from the Linn Records website, ranging from archaic German to Richard Holloway discussing St. Peter from a humanistic perspective to Butt himself on the phenomenological experience of music.

The point, he says, is to provide a window into the context in which Bach was working when he composed the Passions, and the view he gives is pretty astonishing. The fundamental architecture and pacing of the Passion changes dramatically. The jubilation of the closing chorale is swept away by a funeral motet, and the opening chorus comes as a brutal shock out of Buxtehude’s organ Präludium in F-sharp minor (BuxWV 147). Butt describes this shift from organ to orchestra as “like going from black-and-white TV into color”.

Butt has also used three different choirs to reflect the various levels of singing that Bach would have expected during the service. Dunedin’s core singers sing the Passion proper, the Glasgow University Chapel Choir sings the motets, and a large “congregational choir” sings the extra chorales. Such hearty group participation was a key component of Lutheran services – crucial to ingesting the emotions of the liturgy. And while congregational singing these days generally amounts to dirge, Bach’s punters would have held up pretty decently. “The Lutherans were very proud of their singing,” Butt explains. “As one Jesuit put it, Luther killed more souls with his chorales than he did with his sermons.”

Butt says that what’s been particularly interesting for him is the way in which the Passion flows out of and into the other elements of the liturgy without seeming belittled. “Bach’s music is not diluted by the simple hymns around it. That is quite a nineteenthth-century, post-Beethovenian view – that the symphony is self-standing and miraculous, and that you mustn’t fuzzy its edges. But it’s fascinating to hear how the Bach score flows out of another piece [the Buxtehude] almost imperceptibly, but at the same time shockingly perceptibly.”

The recording is a significant landmark in authentic Bach performance, but at the same time it’s refreshingly relaxed around the edges. (Butt doesn’t pretend to have recreated the exact 1724 service, because there’s no way of knowing what that was). When Dunedin performs the Passion and its liturgy at Bach’s baptismal church in Eisenach later this year, it will be the first such performance in Germany.

Is Butt tempted to give the St. Matthew Passion the same treatment? “Tempted, yes – the fascinating question would be whether we’d feel the same dramatic change of pace. The liturgy would be identical, but the Passion music is so much more substantial. We’d be committing ourselves to a good four hours. The great thing about the St. John Passion is you can do the whole thing, liturgy and all, in a single bladder.”

Dunedin Consort’s recording of Bach’s St. John Passion is out on 18 March 2013 on Linn Records.

Kate Molleson – The Herald (Scotland)

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