Why is it that some of Bach’s most joyful and encouraging music revolves around the concept of death?
On Day Three, John Eliot Gardiner – one of the most active and influential conductors of this, and the past, century – explored the issue in four cantatas by Bach.
Fitting the festival theme of Transformation, they illustrated the belief, clearly held by Johann Sebastian Bach, that the end of life is not the end of something, but a transition to another state of being.
Gardiner, now 82, has celebrated a comeback with ensembles he founded only last year, the Constellation Choir & Orchestra. Two years ago he’d severed his connection with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, with whom he’d been identified for sixty years, and withdrew from public life for a while.
A maestro of such vast experience and connections wouldn’t have to start over from scratch of course.
A fresh start. The instrumental sounds we heard in the Thomaskirche were pure, the voices eloquently expressive, the overall sound unfettered. Which is the whole point of the seven-decades-old early music movement, where Gardiner has been a key figure. These are musicians who continually, and critically, shake off tradition, go back to the basics, renew.
Three of the four cantatas on the playbill were first performed in the 1720s in Leipzig. I’m tempted to say that the spirit of Bach hovered over the event. People are often moved to such cute or sweeping statements when they hear music at a location with an authentic connection to a composer. But at the very least, it must give an extra push to the musicians to give their best, and then some.
Disrupting Bach
From the Thomaskirche, then on down the street to the opulent neo-baroque Salles de Pologne. I’d presented the Tal Groethuysen piano duo countless times on my radio show over the years, but this was the first time I’ve heard them live. This was a program of twenty fingers and about three and a half million notes: Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen played Bach pieces as adapted for two pianists.
Long before recordings existed, in a time that was poorer in technology but richer in music education, piano adaptations were a way to disseminate music, combining the joy in hearing something familiar with the pleasant distraction of a new sound.
Nineteenth century piano transcriptions were part of Tal and Groethuysen’s program, beginning with the Sixth Brandenburg Concerto. Here the lower strings in the original are translated to the nether regions of the keyboard. The duo’s mostly judicious use of the pedal helped generate a rumbling turbocharged energy.
Favorites such as the E-flat Prelude and Fugue and the C Minor Passacaglia (both originally for organ) tickled the ear, but the recital’s real sensation was Studies on Bach’s Art of the Fugue, written by Reinhard Febel in 2014 and premiered a year later by the Tal Groethuysen duo.
Often, sitting in a concert, I’ll think, „There’s so much in this piece“ and admonish myself to listen closer, only to scold myself when attention drifts, as good as the performance may be.
What a different experience, then, to hear something one thought one knew, but now rhythmically dislocated, enhanced with dissonance or shaken to its foundations. It makes you snap to attention.
Febel doesn’t take a single note out of the Art of the Fugue, but plumbs its riches, dissecting it or overlaying it with itself.
I’ve heard this kind of thing done a lot, in theory. Usually you don’t hear the connection. In this instance though, Bach is always palpable. Disrupting the music can mean suggesting an infinite number of other ways that can be done. Taking you right back to the source. Another kind of transformation.
