Another mystery solved

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the director of Choral Arts Philadelphia was at a loss to explain the presence of the sopranino recorder  in Bach's Cantata BWV 96, Christ her einige Gottessohn. Bach always assigned extra-musical meanings to his instrumentation, of course, and the director couldn't determine just what the recorder was supposed to symbolize.

Well, inspired by Choral Arts' performance, I purchased a CD of the piece (Bach-Ensemble, cond. by Helmuth Rilling), and found the following in the booklet: "This cantata is one of those compositions, starting with BWV 94, where Bach accorded the modern flute a major role. In aria no. 3 it provides the 'bonds of affection' by which Jesus should draw the spirit. Inn the opening chirus the same player probably had to  use a sopranino recorder to convey the light of the morning star mentioned in the text in a suitably high register."

The complete text of the chorus is as follows:
Lord Christ, the only son of God,
Father's eternally,
From his own heart descended,
Just a scripture saith;
He is the star of morning.   

People try to make this stuff hard.

The holes are very small

Conductor Matthew Glandorf gestures for a soloist to take a bow 

after The Choral Arts Society's performance of J.S. Bach's 

Cantata BWV 80, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.

I didn't need an excuse to blow off Wednesday night's debate between the presidential candidates, but if I had, I couldn't have asked for a better one than the hourlong "Bach at 7" concert by Choral Arts Philadelphia. This season, the choir is working though the cycle of 18 of J.S. Bach's cantatas from 1734-35. Wednesday, it presented BWV 80, the familiar Ein feste Burg isst under Gott, and BWV 96, Herr Christ, der einige Gottesohn, which I had not known, despite my great affection for Bach's cantatas. Of late, they have absorbed me more than any other aspect of his work, but there are 260 of the things. There are only so many hours in a life. 

Herr Christ charmed me with its prominent part for sopranino recorder, played in this performance by Rainer Beckmann, who must be at least 6-foot-2. (It's always the biggest guys who play the tiniest instruments. In every bluegrass band I've ever seen, the mandolin player is a giant.) The sopranino is the dog-whistle of the recorder family. Its lowest pitch is fˊˊ, and the holes are quite close together. Modern instruments, like my little plastic job, are tuned at A=440, but Choral Arts uses the Baroque tuning of A=415. (The string players also use old-style, convex bows, which produce a softer sound than modern, concave bows.) Because of the lower tuning, Rainer explained, the finger holes are very small (though he didn't say why). Then he took his instrument out of its case and showed it to me: The holes were like pinpricks.

One mystery of the cantata concerned the symbolism of the recorder part.  In Bach's religious music the instrumentation always carries extra-musical connotations, Matthew Glandorf, the Choral Arts conductor, told me, but he has been unable to turn up any information on just what the recorder is supposed to stand for in this work.

"The Holy Spirit," I offered. "Flutes are always the Holy Spirit."

Unfortunately, the Paraclete is not mentioned anywhere in the libretto.  

I also asked if there might have been practical reason for the scoring: The sopranino's piercing sound should guarantee that it can be heard over the chorus and the orchestra -- although in the cavernous nave of St. Clement's Church, that was not always the case. No, Matthew replied, mere practicality was not an issue for Bach. There is always a spiritual justification for the choice of instruments. If anyone has any ideas, now's your chance to show off.

Rainer also said Wednesday night was his first professional gig as a sopranino player. In that, I have him beat by 20 years. I played the instrument back in the late 80s in a production of Jean-Claude Van Italie's Mystery Play. It drove the other actors crazy.

A window on the infinite

Time stopped briefly yesterday at St. Katherine of Siena Church in Wayne, where the 40 voices and 30 instrumentalists of the Ama Deus Ensemble presented Bach’s Mass in B Minor. If the performance wasn’t exactly thrilling – a word I wouldn’t use to describe this score in any case – it induced a feeling of otherworldly stasis that may be the closest we nonbelievers ever come to heaven.  (And it’s not even my favorite Bach. That award goes to the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin.)

I don’t mean to imply the performance lagged. Conductor Valentin Radu possessed a sure sense of the score’s momentum, which is essential for this long piece to retain interest. The two hours-plus performance time slipped past without a single longeur that I can recall. Sometimes, no matter how much I enjoy a concert, I am happy to get to the end. This was not one of those times.  

The chorus was consistently good, and on occasion, ravishing. In my program, I circled the “Gratius agimus tibi” of the Gloria, indicating the point at which everything seemed to come together.  The final cadence of the Dona Nobis Pacem seemed a risk. Radu held it for almost too long a time – any longer and it would have verged on parody. But in the event, the effect was beautiful and poignant.

Of the vocal soloists, the standout was easily bass-baritone André Courville. The spotty acoustics in the church favored the lower registers, and his voice came through most forcefully. The wind players were also excellent. I was especially taken with David Ross on wooden flute (this was an original-instrument performance), Sara Davol and David Ross on oboe, and R.J. Kelly on the valveless, curlicue horn.

The performance will be repeated Friday at the Kimmel Center.  

Music of mourning

Last night, while surfing the web, I discovered that my ex-wife died last November of ovarian cancer. Neither she nor any member of her family had informed me she was ill. We had not spoken for several years, but needless to say, I was badly shaken, and although it was late, I went to the stereo to find some kind of relief in music.

My first choice was Ralph Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony. The second was Debussy's "Homage a Rameau" for solo piano. Both of these old favorites came into my head almost as soon as I became aware my ex was gone. Both are gentle, contemplative, and dignified, but with an undercurrent of strength. The fourth movement of the Vaughan Williams, especially, has a wonderful climactic moment in which a wave of sound rises swiftly, but with a satisfying motivation, and crashes over the rocks on shore.

This afternoon, before I walked to work in the snowstorm, the music was more about affirmation than sadness - Bach's Partita No. 2 for solo violin, and Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32. Bach's Chaconne is one of those works that instill a sense of awe over the human mind can conceive. The finale of the Beethoven breaks the bonds of earth. The performances were by Arthur Grumiaux and Alfred Brendel.

I don't know what I will need to turn to next.

A couple more

This from EH in response to my first clerihew:

The wife of Johann Sebastian Bach,
possessed of only a sock
for protection,
created for orchestra a violin section.

It took me a second to get it, but I like it tons. One thing I have sworn never to do is reverse word order for the sake of a rhyme, but EH is a Latin scholar, so we can forgive the "Latinate" construction.

And one more from me:

Charles Ives
Led two lives,
Which freed him to compose
"From Hanover Square North at the End of a Tragic Day the Voice of the People Again Arose."

A clerihew

My Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines a "clerihew" as "a form of comic verse named after its inventor, Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). It consists of two metrically awkward couplets and usually presents a ludicrously uninformative 'biography' of some famous person whose name appears as one of the rhymed words in the first couplet."

The dictionary offers this example:

Geoffrey Chaucer
Could hardly have been coarser,
But this never harmed the sales
Of his Canterbury Tales.

Reading that, I suddenly remembered a poem W.H. Auden once recited on the old Dick Cavett Show, and at last I recognized it for the clerihew it was:

John Milton
Never slept in a Hilton
Hotel,
Which is just as well.

So here, now, is a clerihew of my own (actually my only one) on a musical subject.

Johann Sebastian Bach
Possessed a limitless stock
Of contrapuntal profundity
And full-frontal rotundity.

But what is 'English' about them?

I've been listening to Peter Watchorn's beautiful recordings of Bach's English Suites (Ti-254) for the past few days. The suites are early Bach, dating from the Weimar period (like dates of composition 1709-1717, according to the booklet), but they're not nearly as flashy as some of the organ music he was writing around the same time. As collections of dances — sarabandes, gavottes, bourees, etc. — they prefigure the suites for solo cello cello and the partitias for solo violin. Some like their Bach "white hot," to use a favorite expression of one DJ who has made a specialty of Bach, but what I like about these performances is how intimate and, well, comforting they are. Watchorn's harpsichord sounds like rain pattering against the window on a gray afternoon.

Postscript to my remarks about Marja Kaisla's performance of the Emperor Concerto last Sunday: It struck me sometime this week that the best word to describe her playing is "creamy."