I’m going to write about my dad’s CD collection. Really, I’m a total idiot for not having thought of it sooner. Continue reading
So, Here’s The Score
Featured
24
Let Us Now Speak Of Glenn Gould And Flesh Rubber
In the mythology of Bach, several people figure as Mnemosyne types, serving to remind humanity, “Oh yes, that Bach chap, quite the composer.” Without them, so the legend goes, we might have forgotten entirely about Bach, or at least about such-and-such work by him. There is Felix Mendelssohn, whose rendition of St. Matthew’s Passion in 1825 “brought Bach back to life,” James Gaines writes in “Evening in the Palace of Reason.” There is Pablo Casals, the aforementioned cellist whose interpretation of Bach’s cello suites has scared off many another cellist from attempting them. And then there is the pianist Glenn Gould.
As with any mythology, it helps that Gould, who died in 1982, was unapologetically a character. Continue reading
Would You Like Some Bach With Your Hilary Hahn?
Johann Sebastian Bach. Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. BWV 1001 – 1006. Nathan Milstein. 1975, Polydor International.
Hilary Hahn. Bach. Concertos. Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Jeffrey Kahane. 2003, Deutsche Grammophon.
I happened to listen to the two above CDs back to back. I post their covers side by side to point out the obvious: That is not Bach on the right-hand one. That is Hilary Hahn, the soloist, and just in case we missed that point, the first line of the title lets us know it as well. On the other cover, there’s no mention of the performer until we turn the page and find out it’s a guy named Nathan Milstein. And that’s all we learn about Milstein. There is nothing about him in the liner notes, which are entirely about the music. Continue reading
On Organs, Making Wine, And Selling One’s Soul to the Devil
One of the things the liner notes to all these Bach organ works do is spend a lot of time describing the organs on which the various toccatas and fugues are played.
The notes to the 12-CD set of Bach organ works played by Lionel Rogg use several pages to describe the organ used, the Silbermann organ at Arlesheim. They laud its excellent pedigree as “the only example in Switzerland of the marvelous workmanship of the Silbermann family.” They lament its transformation in the late 19th century to a different sort of organ “according to the taste of the period by a certain Weigle.” And they are joyous about the efforts beginning in 1959 to “restore the original beauty of the instrument. Particular attention was paid to the pipes which were x-rayed in order to reconstitute Silbermann’s voicing.” Continue reading
Happy Birthday, Very Quietly, To You
Today is my mom’s birthday.
Mom has been super-helpful to me throughout this blog-ject so far. She helped me pack up CDs upon CDs upon CDs. She dredged her memory for random factoids. She hasn’t yet thrown out the complete scores to Mahler’s symphonies – yes, all of Mahler’s symphonies – in a fit of cleaning rage. And she has supported and encouraged this blog even when she feels I might be over-sharing.
I had in mind to say happy birthday by writing a history of classical music composers who have somehow incorporated the happy birthday song into their work. This list, it turns out, is shorter than I envisioned, for two reasons. Continue reading
Oh The Horror! The Horror!
On my flight home to Arkansas for Christmas vacation, I started listening to the 12-CD set of Bach organ works in dad’s collection, “L’Oeuvre D’Orgue,” from Lionel Rogg. This was perhaps not the wisest choice, as I found myself being bombarded, on a particularly bumpy return flight to Newark, by BWV 565, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. You know, this:
Merry Christmas! Here’s an Instrument You’ve Never Heard of. Love, Bach
Oboe da Caccia (Wikipedia Commons)
Bach never did anything small, and this is especially true of Christmas. In addition to a number of single cantatas he composed for the holiday, there is Weihnachtsoratorium, or the Christmas Oratorio, a collection of six cantatas telling the familiar Biblical stories of Jesus’ birth (manger, shepherds, wise men) meant to be performed on Christmas and subsequent days.
The Christmas Oratorio pulls together just about every trick of Bach’s in 65 movements, some of them as much as 10 minutes long, many of them repurposed from other Bach works. There are rousing choruses, and plaintive arias, movements that run into each other, word paintings of determined shepherds, echoes, a sense of soaring. Continue reading
The Lunatics Have Taken Over: Favorite Songs of 2011
I am going to depart from dad’s music and write about my own, just for one post. This is what I listen to when I need a break from the Bach. These are my favorite songs of 2011. Continue reading
Top 10 Word Paintings in Bach’s Cantatas
Me, in so far as the cantatas are concerned.
Hoorah! I’m done with the cantatas!
I have listened to all 84 of the ones that are in dad’s collection, some of them in duplicate, triplicate, or even, erm, quadruplicate. I have listened to them from my couch, my computer, my bed, the subway (once or twice while mariachi bands or hip-hop heads competed for my attention from outside my headphones), the street, the grocery store. I have hit roadblocks. I have stopped for a week or more at a time. I have dosed myself with interludes of AC/DC. But I am finally, finally, done. Continue reading
‘It’s Beautiful, Isn’t It? Welllllllll. Beautiful Is Good’
So this guy Alexander Chen, who lives in Brooklyn (naturally) created this pretty cool thing, a visualization of the prelude from Bach’s first cello suite:
Baroque.me: J.S. Bach – Cello Suite No. 1 – Prelude from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.
Chen (who you may remember from a musical visualization of the New York subway system that made all New Yorkers wistfully wish the actual experience of riding the subway was even one-millionth as cool) writes of this project: Continue reading
Coffee, Coffee Muss Ich Haben
I’m a total coffee addict.
I’ve owned three espresso machines in as many years — I think this last one, a Nespresso model that seems like it should also be able to, I don’t know, convert water to wine, given how much it cost, will stick. I think nothing of going miles out of my way for a good cup of coffee — especially if it entails the beans being shot through pneumatic tubes first. I don’t mind making my friends drive miles out of their way, either, just so I can find a decent cup (yeah, North Fork of Long Island, I’m looking at you, and I don’t care if your wine people sneer at me when I bring my coffee into your tasting rooms, either.) I once dressed up for Halloween as “not a morning person,” wore my PJs, wrapped my alarm clock cord around my neck, and incorporated a coffee cup into my costume. In short, without my coffee, I would dry up like a piece of roast goat.
Not that that’s the imagery I would necessarily have chosen, that last bit, but I must admit it fits. You have a character named Liesgen, invented for Bach’s Coffee Cantata, to thank for that. Continue reading