Not so miscellaneous today: before going to Thanksgiving dinner yesterday with friends, I had a couple of free hours so I listened to most of the St. Matthew Passion by Bach. What an amazing work! This is the version I heard:
I grew up with the Klemperer recording, but this version is very much better. There are two small orchestras, two mixed choirs, two sets of four vocal soloists and six boy sopranos. The way Bach uses these forces is really remarkable. There are frequent montages where the choirs interject short, brisk phrases into a texture that might be one or both orchestras with obbligato solo parts, or a chorale like texture with the melody of the boy sopranos floating above, within a narrative carried by recitatives from a host of characters: Judas, Pontius Pilate, priests, bystanders and, of course, Jesus with his surrounding halo of strings. This is as close as Bach ever got to opera, but it is nothing like opera. Oddly enough, the montage sections remind me of Stravinsky's Petrouschka.
Speaking of the Netherlands Bach Society's project to record all of Bach, I have listened to many recordings so far and I have been impressed with nearly all of them. No big stars, but very accomplished and committed musicians. Listening to this it is hard to see classical music as a dying genre, no longer of any relevance as a recent series of YouTube clips would have us believe!
Here are a few recent recordings in the series:
Yes, they are terrific! But for the big vocal works, my faves are still Herreweghe and Suzuki (very different but equally great in their own way). Gardiner is fine but too inconsistent. German conductors are reliably bad (go figure!)
ReplyDeleteit's been decades since I've heard the Klemperer take on Bach. I heard his Mass in B minor and when I think back on it I think that Bach didn't sound like Bach so much as turgid Mahler.
ReplyDeleteIt's nice to have more options for Bach recordings now. i've enjoyed the Suzuki recordings of Bach I've heard so far.
Thanks for the comments. They are what motivate me! The recording that really made me a Bach fan, way back in the early 70s, was the Karl Richter recording of the Mass in B minor with the Munich Bach choir and orchestra. And I still find it my go-to recording today.
ReplyDeleteBryan, not related to this post, but I wonder what you think of this? https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-paint-with-sound-by-a-virtuoso-classical-guitarist
ReplyDeleteThanks, Patrick, that is an excellent and factual discussion of the timbral variety of the guitar.
ReplyDelete