Discovering Bach

I think my original impetus to study Bach  came from singing his Jesu, meine Freude motet and the B minor mass at Newcastle Conservatorium, under Michael Dudman's expert direction. 

After that,  I mainly only experienced the great instrumental works, like his keyboard preludes and fugues and the Brandenburg Concertos.

In 2002, I bit the bullet and bought the Teldec Bach 2000 set, which was discounted from $2200 to $1500 and includes all 1080 of Bach's extant works.
I listened to every single CD and nearly drove my wife mad with the 71 CDs of cantatas, because Harnoncourt's boy sopranos are out of tune in at least six of the CDs and they are not appealing performances.

In 2007, I had the opportunity of participating in ABC TV's Einstein Factor on the subject of J S Bach. I went down the gurgler on the second episode and only won the first one by one question. But i learnt a lot more about Bach during my preparation!
But when I discovered John Eliot Gardiner's Pilgrimage series, I began collecting them, and at a very attractive price. His Monteverdi Choir's performances are invariably beautiful. They make exploring the cantatas a very pleasant task.
These days you can do it all so cheaply! The Teldec set has been reissued for $300, but without the terrific booklets [though I believe they are online].

Gardiner's stuff is all freely available on Spotify and there is a wonderful abundance of first rate recordings of Bach's music on Youtube.

Cantatas for the season

I'm attempting to learn more about Bach's cantatas through listening to the ones for the relevant part of the church year. At the moment I am listening to Advent and Christmas cantatas and am thoroughly enjoying John Eliot Gardiner's Pilgrimage CD no 15, which contains cantatas which were performed in New York in 2000.

The texts are wonderful and the music has great variety and is performed superbly, as always.

Graham Abbott's Keys to Music program on Bach's cantatas which was broadcast last Saturday is also beautiful and enlightening.

If you are quick, you may be able to listen to it at Keys to Music

Attempting to acquaint myself with Bach's cantatas

I love Bach's cantatas, though I can only recognise a small number by name. In 2001, I bought a copy of the Teldec Bach 2000 set, and, like many, found that the cantatas were less than satisfactory. The worst bit is the number of times the boy sopranos are out of tune. About 6 of the 60 CDs are actually painful, and it was good to be able to listen to all of Bach's works.

The booklets are very helpful, and it is interesting to be able to listen to all of Bach's extant works. My set cost me $1500 for 153, which sounds cheap at $10 per CD, but now there is a Dutch set of Bach's compositions that costs about $300. It does not include any printed information, but you can get this from a CD-ROM or online, I think.

But I am collecting Eliot Gardiner's wonderful Bach Pilgrimage set which is greatly superior to the Harnoncourt Teldec set.

I've discovered the excellent Bach cantatas website, linked to above, has enough information to answer almost any question I could ask about the sacred cantatas.

And Christoph Wolff's book gives you details of the three year cycle that Bach composed, most of which is extant. So you can go through the church year, listening to the relevant cantatas for each day or week or part of the Christian calendar.

I listened to BWV 61 today, as the first step on my journey.

You know what they say: the greatest journey begins with ...
a trip to the bathroom.

Bach Pilgrimage

This afternoon I downloaded from the International Music Score Library Project the scores for the three cantatas in the concert on the wonderful Bach Pilgrimage DVD and have just listened to the first two cantatas. The first one on the dvd is

BWV 179 Siehu zu, daß deine Gottesfurcht nicht Heuchelei sei
See to it that thy fear of God be not hypocrisy

which is based on the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke chapter 18. When the self-righteous Pharisee prays he brags about what a great person he is and is really praying to himself. But the tax collector humbly asks God to be merciful to him, because he knows he is a sinner.
The anonymous librettist created a wonderful interpretation of Jesus' parable, aiming to remind us, in the words of Ecclesiasticus 1:28

Do not serve God with a double heart

which is the basis of the sensational opening fugue.

The tenor then sings a recitative and aria which tells us that

Today's Christianity is, alas, in a sorry state. Most Christians are puffed up Pharisees.

The following bass recitative tells us that a true Christian is someone who

is inwardly and outwardly the same.

Magdalena Kozena sings the next aria

BWV 199 Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut
My heart is bathed in blood.

She is a superb dramatic performer and conveys the varied emotions of the text marvellously, from the deeply sorrowful opening recitative and aria to the joyful concluding recitative and aria

How joyful is my heart for God is reconciled with me

I'm looking forward to listening to the last cantata, after this short blogging break. Bach's music depicts the sense of the text superbly. I highly recommend this dvd, even if you do not yet know much about Bach. The rest of the recording tells the story of this pilgrimage around Germany, other parts of Europe and Britain, and finishing in New York. John Eliot Gardiner and his orchestra, chorus and guest soloists spent 2000 visiting places where Bach had first performed his music [which is only Germany], but also performing the cantatas on the day of the church calendar on which they were originally heard. [Occasionally this wasn't possible, due to the movable nature of the church calendar, which you will notice with the variety of tiems when Easter is celebrated, for example.]