John Alexander Blyth wrote (one month ago, so that I quote extensively!):
<<I used to accept the received wisdom that Bach wrote absolute music,
capable of being played on the anything that could get the notes. Then I
heard a performance of a Bach violin sonata with baroque violin and
haprsichord at A=415. The way in which the timbres of the two instruments
combined and served to carry through continuities of ideas which wouldn't
have existed if it had been modern violin and modern piano made me realise
that there was a whole dimension to his music that we had completely
ignored, since the residue was so complete.
No, Bach was a still greater composer than we usually think and timbre was
important to him, even although he must rarely have had ideal circumstances
to realise it.>>
<< I've made a study of Bach's vocal writing, partly because I, a baritone,
want to sing
all the Bach I can, and partly because I've been working on an oratorio
which I want to be effective, not just clever. I noted again and again
Bach's deft handling of the orchestra so that the voices would always be
audible and effective. I think of him as one of the pre-eminently GREAT
(yes I do mean to shout) composers for voice, and his manifest sensitivity
to timbre is but one sign of it.>>
I was very pleased to read these lines, since I could have written them
myself! ;-)
As a baritone and Bach enthusiast, I have also borrowed all his cantatas
from the nearest music library (4 per week = about one year!), and read
through all of the bass arias in order to find the ones that I could sing!
I also had to fight against teachers from the old school (before the recent
baroque "revival"), who kept transmitting stupid ideas about "abstract
music" and saying that "everything is in the score, you just have to play
the notes as they are written".
I had to rediscover for myself the incredible sensuality of Bach's vocal
lines, its fantastic dramatic intensity, its rhetorical power... All the
qualities that have been demonstrated again and again by "baroque" ensembles
ever since - and even, more and more often, by singers, though in many
instances the right balance has still to be found IMO. I mean that I still
often would like to mix the voices used by Karajan or Klemperer with
Herreweghe or Gardiner orchestra - actually either teaching baroque phrasing
to those voices or teaching legato and chiaroscuro to "baroque" voices...
However, I have to say that I still find a huge gap between Bach's vocal
works in latin and in German. In the latin works, the voice parts seem much
more instrumental indeed, and it is more difficult to go beyond a certain
coldness that one might feel at first. Bach felt probably less personnally,
humanly implicated in works written to please the prince of Sachsen-Polen
than in works written in his own daily language for his own singers and
church.
| Alain Zürcher, Paris, France
| L'Atelier du Chanteur :
| http://chanteur.net
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