If you’d kept your mouth shut, we might have thought you were clever.
Attributed to Boethius
Friday, April 29, 2011
Of the 10 most segregated urban areas in America ...
... none are in the South.
Slideshow with maps can be found here.
The ten are:
10. LA
9. Philadelphia
8. Cincinnati
7. St. Louis
6. Buffalo
5. Cleveland
4. Detroit
3. Chicago
2. NY
1. Milwaukee
Slideshow with maps can be found here.
The ten are:
10. LA
9. Philadelphia
8. Cincinnati
7. St. Louis
6. Buffalo
5. Cleveland
4. Detroit
3. Chicago
2. NY
1. Milwaukee
Saturday, April 16, 2011
This Holy Week Christ is both Lamb and Lion
This Holy Week, Christ is both Lion and Lamb. Augustine meditates a bit on this paradox:
In fulfillment of Holy Writ, the Truth has resounded
through the voice of the Apostles, for the Psalmist has sung:
'Their voice has gone forth unto all the earth, and their
words unto the ends of the world. So, also: 'Christ our
passover is sacrificed'for of Him the Prophet had foretold:
'He was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and he was mute
as a lamb before its shearer, and he opened not his mouth.'
Who is this man? He is the man of whom the Prophet at
once goes on to say: 'In humility his judgment was taken
away: who shall declare his generation?
I recognize the realization of so much humility in a king of so much power,
for He who is as a lamb that opens not its mouth before its shearer is also 'the lion of the tribe of Juda.'
Who is this Iamb and lion? He suffered death like a lamb, and
He has devoured like a lion.
Who is this lamb and lion?
Meek, yet courageous;
lovable, yet fearsome;
innocent, yet powerful;
silent under judgment,
yet roaring to pronounce judgment.
Who is this lamb and one suffering like a lamb;
rising up like a lion? Rather, is He not at the same time a
lamb and lion in both His suffering and His resurrection?
Let us discern the lamb in the suffering. 'He was,' as we have
just reminded you, 'mute as a lamb before its shearer, and
he opened not his mouth'
Let us discern the lion in the suffering. Jacob has said: 'Thou hast risen: resting thou hast slept as a lion.'
Let us discern the lamb in the resurrection. When the Apocalypse is speaking of the everlasting glory of virgins, it says: They follow the Lamb whithersoever
he goes.'
Let us discern the lion in the resurrection. The Apocalypse also says: The lion of the tribe of Juda has overcome to open the scroll.'
Why is He a lamb in His suffering? Because, although He was innocent, He suffered
death.
Why is He a lion in His suffering? Because He slew death when He himself was slain.
Fathers of the Church , Vol. 11. p. 307.
In fulfillment of Holy Writ, the Truth has resounded
through the voice of the Apostles, for the Psalmist has sung:
'Their voice has gone forth unto all the earth, and their
words unto the ends of the world. So, also: 'Christ our
passover is sacrificed'for of Him the Prophet had foretold:
'He was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and he was mute
as a lamb before its shearer, and he opened not his mouth.'
Who is this man? He is the man of whom the Prophet at
once goes on to say: 'In humility his judgment was taken
away: who shall declare his generation?
I recognize the realization of so much humility in a king of so much power,
for He who is as a lamb that opens not its mouth before its shearer is also 'the lion of the tribe of Juda.'
Who is this Iamb and lion? He suffered death like a lamb, and
He has devoured like a lion.
Who is this lamb and lion?
Meek, yet courageous;
lovable, yet fearsome;
innocent, yet powerful;
silent under judgment,
yet roaring to pronounce judgment.
Who is this lamb and one suffering like a lamb;
rising up like a lion? Rather, is He not at the same time a
lamb and lion in both His suffering and His resurrection?
Let us discern the lamb in the suffering. 'He was,' as we have
just reminded you, 'mute as a lamb before its shearer, and
he opened not his mouth'
Let us discern the lion in the suffering. Jacob has said: 'Thou hast risen: resting thou hast slept as a lion.'
Let us discern the lamb in the resurrection. When the Apocalypse is speaking of the everlasting glory of virgins, it says: They follow the Lamb whithersoever
he goes.'
Let us discern the lion in the resurrection. The Apocalypse also says: The lion of the tribe of Juda has overcome to open the scroll.'
Why is He a lamb in His suffering? Because, although He was innocent, He suffered
death.
Why is He a lion in His suffering? Because He slew death when He himself was slain.
Fathers of the Church , Vol. 11. p. 307.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
The ethical basis of fairy tales
More Chesterton.
If you really read the fairy-tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other—the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales. The whole happiness of fairyland hangs upon a thread, upon one thread. Cinderella may have a dress woven on supernatural looms and blazing with unearthly brilliance; but she must be back when the clock strikes twelve. The king may invite fairies to the christening, but he must invite all the fairies or frightful results will follow. Bluebeard's wife may open all doors but one. A promise is broken to a cat, and the whole world goes wrong. A promise is broken to a yellow dwarf, and the whole world goes wrong. A girl may be the bride of the God of Love himself if she never tries to see him; she sees him, and he vanishes away. A girl is given a box on condition she does not open it; she opens it, and all the evils of this world rush out at her. A man and woman are put in a garden on condition that they do not eat one fruit: they eat it, and lose their joy in all the fruits of the earth.
This great idea, then, is the backbone of all folk-lore—the idea that all happiness hangs on one thin veto; all positive joy depends on one negative. Now, it is obvious that there are many philosophical and religious ideas akin to or symbolised by this; but it is not with them I wish to deal here. It is surely obvious that all ethics ought to be taught to this fairy-tale tune; that, if one does the thing forbidden, one imperils all the things provided. A man who breaks his promise to his wife ought to be reminded that, even if she is a cat, the case of the fairy-cat shows that such conduct may be incautious. A burglar just about to open some one else's safe should be playfully reminded that he is in the perilous posture of the beautiful Pandora: he is about to lift the forbidden lid and loosen evils unknown. The boy eating some one's apples in some one's apple tree should be a reminder that he has come to a mystical moment of his life, when one apple may rob him of all others. This is the profound morality of fairy-tales; which, so far from being lawless, go to the root of all law. Instead of finding (like common books of ethics) a rationalistic basis for each Commandment, they find the great mystical basis for all Commandments. We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world. The vetoes are indeed extraordinary, but then so are the concessions. The idea of property, the idea of some one else's apples, is a rum idea; but then the idea of there being any apples is a rum idea. It is strange and weird that I cannot with safety drink ten bottles of champagne; but then the champagne itself is strange and weird, if you come to that. If I have drunk of the fairies' drink it is but just I should drink by the fairies' rules. We may not see the direct logical connection between three beautiful silver spoons and a large ugly policeman; but then who in fairy tales ever could see the direct logical connection between three bears and a giant, or between a rose and a roaring beast? Not only can these fairy-tales be enjoyed because they are moral, but morality can be enjoyed because it puts us in fairyland, in a world at once of wonder and of war.
From the essay Fairy Tales, available here.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Fairy tales and victory over evil
Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
G.K Chesterton.
HT: Evangel Blog.
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Friday, April 08, 2011
The New Yorker tackles Bach's sacred music
The New Yorker tackles Bach's sacred music
Johann Sebastian Bach lost both of his parents when he was nine and watched ten of his children die young. He was, in other words, well acquainted with death, and may have been uncommonly sensitive to the emotional chaos that it engenders. The musicologist Gerd Rienäcker has written that Bach possessed a “consciousness of catastrophe”—a feeling for the suddenness and arbitrariness with which suffering descends on unsuspecting souls. The texts of Bach’s church cantatas—I recently finished listening to all two hundred of them, courtesy of John Eliot Gardiner’s recorded survey—indicate that the life of man is like a rising and vanishing mist; that we live with one foot in the grave; and that those who sit among us like gods will be forgotten. The world is said to be like a hospital in which countless people, even infants in cradles, lie down in sickness. The words “Kyrie eleison”—“Lord, have mercy”—have been set to music thousands of times, but in the first bars of the Mass in B Minor, Bach’s valediction, they become a peculiarly visceral cry, a collective plea for grace.
The Bach Collegium Japan, under the leadership of Masaaki Suzuki, recently performed the B-Minor Mass at Carnegie Hall, as part of Carnegie’s season-long festival of Japanese culture. The Tohoku earthquake was on everyone’s mind, and there was probably no need for Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, to have mentioned it in remarks before the concert began. From the first colossally churning chords, it was clear that Bach had heard the news in advance. What seems so extraordinary about this work, along with other monuments of Bach’s sacred writing, is that it captures the human and the inhuman in equal measure. We feel both the blind mechanics of catastrophe and the desperation of those caught in its midst. Perhaps the most uncanny example is the opening chorus of the “St. John Passion.” The orchestra begins with a divine maelstrom: swirling sixteenth-note figures, stinging dissonances, a pulsing drone in the bass. Three times the chorus cries out “Herr!”—“Lord!”—and then is caught up in the rapid-moving instrumental rhythm, in an image of mortal helplessness.
Suzuki, who was born in Kobe, in 1954, founded the Bach Collegium Japan in 1990. He has since established himself not only as a pioneer of early-music playing in East Asia but as an international Bach authority. For the BIS label, he has recorded the large-scale sacred pieces and is nearing the end of a survey of the church cantatas. (Volume 48 is just out; seven volumes remain.) Renditions of Bach’s vocal works these days fall between two extremes: the old-school approach, in which a big chorus and ensemble gather to make a hearty din; and the austere stance of early-music radicals, who deploy only an ensemble of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, on the theory that Bach intended one voice to a part. (In the wrong hands, the “one voice per part” approach can yield a scrawny sound, but in recent cantata recordings under the direction of Sigiswald Kuijken, on the Accent label, it has the effect of clearing away centuries of musical clutter.) Suzuki, like Gardiner and the august Belgian conductor Philippe Herreweghe, follows a pragmatic middle path. At Carnegie, he had a chorus of twenty-one singers and an ensemble of twenty-six players. In interpretive style, he tends toward subtlety rather than flamboyance, avoiding the abrupt accents, florid ornaments, and freewheeling tempos that are fashionable in Baroque performance practice. He is strong on clarity and musicality, sometimes lacking in force.
So it was with Suzuki’s B-Minor Mass. The chorus was a marvel of focussed pitch and blended tone: in the opening bars, the sopranos immaculately pierced the air. Suzuki showed a patient structural command, giving an arc-like shape to the Kyrie by waiting a hundred or so bars before applying a substantial crescendo. As the evening went on, though, I yearned for more drama, less detachment; the unearthly “Crucifixus,” the scene of Christ’s crucifixion, was oddly pristine, and the shivery Judgment Day chords in the “Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum” section passed by without tremors of strangeness. The fine and experienced soloists—Hana BlazÃková, Rachel Nicholls, Clint van der Linde, Gerd Türk, and Peter Kooij—struggled at times to be heard in Carnegie’s velvet cavern. By the end, I wondered whether Carnegie was fundamentally inhospitable to Suzuki’s super-refined style; an intimate space would have revealed more. Still, the Bach Collegium Japan delivered a performance of gently glowing beauty, with Bach in consoling rather than apocalyptic mode.
Gardiner, the vital English maestro who has animated repertory from Monteverdi to Percy Grainger, undertook the project of performing and recording all of Bach’s sacred cantatas a decade ago. Beginning on Christmas Day, 1999, and ending on the last day of 2000, he travelled with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists to more than fifty churches in Europe and America, including hallowed places where Bach worked. As much as possible, the cantatas were programmed according to their appointed place in the liturgical calendar, so that Christmas works were played at Christmastime, Pentecostal ones on Pentecost, and so forth. In a magnificent display of stubbornness, Gardiner went on recording his “Bach cantata pilgrimage,” as he called it, even after the Deutsche Grammophon label withdrew its support. He eventually established an independent company called Soli Deo Gloria—Bach liked to end his scores with those words, which mean “to the glory of God alone”—and began releasing several two-CD volumes each year, with lavish annotations and striking cover photographs of South Asian, Central Asian, and African faces. The twenty-seventh and final installment appeared last fall. (Four other volumes had earlier appeared on DG and are now available as part of a twenty-two-CD boxed set titled “Sacred Masterpieces,” which, at around fifty dollars, is an amazing bargain.) There are five rival cantata surveys—by Helmuth Rilling, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, Ton Koopman, Pieter Jan Leusink, and Suzuki—and each has its virtues.
Gardiner’s is the most consistently vivid, and offers some of the loveliest Bach singing on record; Magdalena Kozená, Bernarda Fink, Mark Padmore, Gerald Finley, and Dietrich Henschel are among the masterly singers who join the tour.
More than half of the sacred cantatas were written between 1723 and 1726, when Bach was in the early years of his long, and often unrewarding, appointment as the cantor of the Thomaskirche, in Leipzig. For extended stretches of the liturgical year, he produced one cantata a week, and for the most part he refused to take the easy path of reworking older pieces, whether his own or others’. Instead, in what seems a kind of creative rage, he experimented with every aspect of the cantata form, which traditionally served as a musical meditation on the Scriptural readings of the week. There are intimidating fugal choruses, sublimely extended operatic arias, frenzied instrumental interludes, weird chords galore, episodes of almost irreverent dancing merriment. To hear the entire corpus is to be buffeted by the restless energy of Bach’s imagination. Recently, I listened to around fifty of the cantatas during a thousand-mile drive in inland Australia, and, far from getting too much of a good thing, I found myself regularly hitting the repeat button. Once or twice, I stopped on the side of the road in tears.
If Suzuki tends to play it too cool, Gardiner can err in the opposite direction. He likes strong contrasts of dynamics and tempo, telling shifts of texture and mood. In notes for the cantata “Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee vom Himmel fällt” (“For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from Heaven”), in Volume 20, Gardiner observes that the continuo part “goes ballistic” when the Turks and the Papists are mentioned, and Gardiner’s execution of that idea is by no means the only instance of ballistics on the set. Sometimes such interventions seem arbitrary, but more often they serve the charged imagery of the cantata texts: you hear the rain and the wind, the power and the glory, the weeping and the wailing (a shrieking soprano recorder communicates holy terror in the chorus “Ihr werdet weinen und heulen”—“Ye shall weep and lament”). In “Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig” (“Oh how fleeting, oh how trifling”) the orchestra even conveys the self-important bustle of an urban crowd.
The almost operatic quality of these narratives is heightened by the changing moods of the liturgical year. The pivotal moment comes at Eastertime (Volume 22), where the sepulchral chants of “Christ lag in Todesbanden” (“Christ lay in the bonds of death”) give way to the brassy shouts of “Der Himmel lacht! Die Erde jubilieret” (“The heavens laugh! The earth rejoices”). Among many brilliant efforts by the Monteverdi Choir, the rendition of “Christ lag” stands out: Gardiner has his singers intone the solo lines in unison, each syllable chillingly precise. This release and the preceding one, Volume 21, make for an excellent introduction to the series.
There is no way to tell from the sound itself that “Christ lag in Todesbanden” is being played in the Georgenkirche, in Eisenach, next to the font where Bach was baptized, in 1685. Once you know it, though, you cannot forget it. A sense of occasion, of ritual time, is sustained throughout. Gardiner adds layers of significance in his spirited liner notes, which are based on a tour diary: he speaks of visiting Buchenwald, outside Weimar; of a Leipzig pastor’s resistance to East German oppression; of French soccer fans blasting their car horns moments after one performance ended; of a spooky old cleric congratulating the musicians on having administered a good beating to the Devil. Most of all, this mammoth project—an act of devotion worthy of Bach himself—lays bare what is most human in the composer’s enterprise. Listening to “Christ lag,” I pictured Bach’s parents looking on at the baptism of the infant and wondering whether he would live. They had no idea.
Johann Sebastian Bach lost both of his parents when he was nine and watched ten of his children die young. He was, in other words, well acquainted with death, and may have been uncommonly sensitive to the emotional chaos that it engenders. The musicologist Gerd Rienäcker has written that Bach possessed a “consciousness of catastrophe”—a feeling for the suddenness and arbitrariness with which suffering descends on unsuspecting souls. The texts of Bach’s church cantatas—I recently finished listening to all two hundred of them, courtesy of John Eliot Gardiner’s recorded survey—indicate that the life of man is like a rising and vanishing mist; that we live with one foot in the grave; and that those who sit among us like gods will be forgotten. The world is said to be like a hospital in which countless people, even infants in cradles, lie down in sickness. The words “Kyrie eleison”—“Lord, have mercy”—have been set to music thousands of times, but in the first bars of the Mass in B Minor, Bach’s valediction, they become a peculiarly visceral cry, a collective plea for grace.
The Bach Collegium Japan, under the leadership of Masaaki Suzuki, recently performed the B-Minor Mass at Carnegie Hall, as part of Carnegie’s season-long festival of Japanese culture. The Tohoku earthquake was on everyone’s mind, and there was probably no need for Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, to have mentioned it in remarks before the concert began. From the first colossally churning chords, it was clear that Bach had heard the news in advance. What seems so extraordinary about this work, along with other monuments of Bach’s sacred writing, is that it captures the human and the inhuman in equal measure. We feel both the blind mechanics of catastrophe and the desperation of those caught in its midst. Perhaps the most uncanny example is the opening chorus of the “St. John Passion.” The orchestra begins with a divine maelstrom: swirling sixteenth-note figures, stinging dissonances, a pulsing drone in the bass. Three times the chorus cries out “Herr!”—“Lord!”—and then is caught up in the rapid-moving instrumental rhythm, in an image of mortal helplessness.
Suzuki, who was born in Kobe, in 1954, founded the Bach Collegium Japan in 1990. He has since established himself not only as a pioneer of early-music playing in East Asia but as an international Bach authority. For the BIS label, he has recorded the large-scale sacred pieces and is nearing the end of a survey of the church cantatas. (Volume 48 is just out; seven volumes remain.) Renditions of Bach’s vocal works these days fall between two extremes: the old-school approach, in which a big chorus and ensemble gather to make a hearty din; and the austere stance of early-music radicals, who deploy only an ensemble of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, on the theory that Bach intended one voice to a part. (In the wrong hands, the “one voice per part” approach can yield a scrawny sound, but in recent cantata recordings under the direction of Sigiswald Kuijken, on the Accent label, it has the effect of clearing away centuries of musical clutter.) Suzuki, like Gardiner and the august Belgian conductor Philippe Herreweghe, follows a pragmatic middle path. At Carnegie, he had a chorus of twenty-one singers and an ensemble of twenty-six players. In interpretive style, he tends toward subtlety rather than flamboyance, avoiding the abrupt accents, florid ornaments, and freewheeling tempos that are fashionable in Baroque performance practice. He is strong on clarity and musicality, sometimes lacking in force.
So it was with Suzuki’s B-Minor Mass. The chorus was a marvel of focussed pitch and blended tone: in the opening bars, the sopranos immaculately pierced the air. Suzuki showed a patient structural command, giving an arc-like shape to the Kyrie by waiting a hundred or so bars before applying a substantial crescendo. As the evening went on, though, I yearned for more drama, less detachment; the unearthly “Crucifixus,” the scene of Christ’s crucifixion, was oddly pristine, and the shivery Judgment Day chords in the “Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum” section passed by without tremors of strangeness. The fine and experienced soloists—Hana BlazÃková, Rachel Nicholls, Clint van der Linde, Gerd Türk, and Peter Kooij—struggled at times to be heard in Carnegie’s velvet cavern. By the end, I wondered whether Carnegie was fundamentally inhospitable to Suzuki’s super-refined style; an intimate space would have revealed more. Still, the Bach Collegium Japan delivered a performance of gently glowing beauty, with Bach in consoling rather than apocalyptic mode.
Gardiner, the vital English maestro who has animated repertory from Monteverdi to Percy Grainger, undertook the project of performing and recording all of Bach’s sacred cantatas a decade ago. Beginning on Christmas Day, 1999, and ending on the last day of 2000, he travelled with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists to more than fifty churches in Europe and America, including hallowed places where Bach worked. As much as possible, the cantatas were programmed according to their appointed place in the liturgical calendar, so that Christmas works were played at Christmastime, Pentecostal ones on Pentecost, and so forth. In a magnificent display of stubbornness, Gardiner went on recording his “Bach cantata pilgrimage,” as he called it, even after the Deutsche Grammophon label withdrew its support. He eventually established an independent company called Soli Deo Gloria—Bach liked to end his scores with those words, which mean “to the glory of God alone”—and began releasing several two-CD volumes each year, with lavish annotations and striking cover photographs of South Asian, Central Asian, and African faces. The twenty-seventh and final installment appeared last fall. (Four other volumes had earlier appeared on DG and are now available as part of a twenty-two-CD boxed set titled “Sacred Masterpieces,” which, at around fifty dollars, is an amazing bargain.) There are five rival cantata surveys—by Helmuth Rilling, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt, Ton Koopman, Pieter Jan Leusink, and Suzuki—and each has its virtues.
Gardiner’s is the most consistently vivid, and offers some of the loveliest Bach singing on record; Magdalena Kozená, Bernarda Fink, Mark Padmore, Gerald Finley, and Dietrich Henschel are among the masterly singers who join the tour.
More than half of the sacred cantatas were written between 1723 and 1726, when Bach was in the early years of his long, and often unrewarding, appointment as the cantor of the Thomaskirche, in Leipzig. For extended stretches of the liturgical year, he produced one cantata a week, and for the most part he refused to take the easy path of reworking older pieces, whether his own or others’. Instead, in what seems a kind of creative rage, he experimented with every aspect of the cantata form, which traditionally served as a musical meditation on the Scriptural readings of the week. There are intimidating fugal choruses, sublimely extended operatic arias, frenzied instrumental interludes, weird chords galore, episodes of almost irreverent dancing merriment. To hear the entire corpus is to be buffeted by the restless energy of Bach’s imagination. Recently, I listened to around fifty of the cantatas during a thousand-mile drive in inland Australia, and, far from getting too much of a good thing, I found myself regularly hitting the repeat button. Once or twice, I stopped on the side of the road in tears.
If Suzuki tends to play it too cool, Gardiner can err in the opposite direction. He likes strong contrasts of dynamics and tempo, telling shifts of texture and mood. In notes for the cantata “Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee vom Himmel fällt” (“For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from Heaven”), in Volume 20, Gardiner observes that the continuo part “goes ballistic” when the Turks and the Papists are mentioned, and Gardiner’s execution of that idea is by no means the only instance of ballistics on the set. Sometimes such interventions seem arbitrary, but more often they serve the charged imagery of the cantata texts: you hear the rain and the wind, the power and the glory, the weeping and the wailing (a shrieking soprano recorder communicates holy terror in the chorus “Ihr werdet weinen und heulen”—“Ye shall weep and lament”). In “Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig” (“Oh how fleeting, oh how trifling”) the orchestra even conveys the self-important bustle of an urban crowd.
The almost operatic quality of these narratives is heightened by the changing moods of the liturgical year. The pivotal moment comes at Eastertime (Volume 22), where the sepulchral chants of “Christ lag in Todesbanden” (“Christ lay in the bonds of death”) give way to the brassy shouts of “Der Himmel lacht! Die Erde jubilieret” (“The heavens laugh! The earth rejoices”). Among many brilliant efforts by the Monteverdi Choir, the rendition of “Christ lag” stands out: Gardiner has his singers intone the solo lines in unison, each syllable chillingly precise. This release and the preceding one, Volume 21, make for an excellent introduction to the series.
There is no way to tell from the sound itself that “Christ lag in Todesbanden” is being played in the Georgenkirche, in Eisenach, next to the font where Bach was baptized, in 1685. Once you know it, though, you cannot forget it. A sense of occasion, of ritual time, is sustained throughout. Gardiner adds layers of significance in his spirited liner notes, which are based on a tour diary: he speaks of visiting Buchenwald, outside Weimar; of a Leipzig pastor’s resistance to East German oppression; of French soccer fans blasting their car horns moments after one performance ended; of a spooky old cleric congratulating the musicians on having administered a good beating to the Devil. Most of all, this mammoth project—an act of devotion worthy of Bach himself—lays bare what is most human in the composer’s enterprise. Listening to “Christ lag,” I pictured Bach’s parents looking on at the baptism of the infant and wondering whether he would live. They had no idea.
Monday, April 04, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)