One evening in my caustic 20’s — a decade when I’d get mad if people liked music that I didn’t — I was bullshitting with my friend Gregg Kallor at his apartment. Half to push his buttons, and half to air a half-baked opinion, I said, “I’d rather listen to a well-recorded mediocre performance than a historical great one.” This was in the early days of my classical listening, and I figured all the performances were ‘close enough’ if the notes were right.
Gregg, a pianist and composer, got prickly and he pulled out two CD’s of Rachmaninoff’s music, one by Ruth Laredo, one by Vladimir Horowitz.
Here’s Ruth playing the G# Minor Prelude:
And here’s Vladimir in the same passage:
OK, OK, OK, I was wrong. Vladimir pulls you in to demand your attention, and even the wrong notes work; Ruth… plays the notes. (Acknowledgment required here that it isn’t fair to pit Ruth (or anyone) against Volodya.) At any rate, I conceded, retreated, and we started up on some other topic to exhaust each other’s patience. (Love you, Gregg!)
For this post, I'm covering the balance of Bach’s songs which I haven’t yet listened to this year. Which of these 58 songs stood out? The ones performed by the greatest singers! Ruth vs. Vladimir all over again… In my notes, I starred almost all the tracks sung by Magdalena Kožená, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Peter Schreier. These three towering artists seem use their sensitive and powerful voices to express their full personhood through Bach’s phrases.
For this project, I’ve heard a lot of cries to Gott that just feel like sung notes. The music has been enjoyable enough because of the quality of the writing, though I haven’t always felt compelled to have a second listen.
But perhaps they’re all masterpieces when the performances are great.
For this post, I listened to BWV 439, 440, 442, 444, 448, 451, 454-459, 462-5, 467-8, 470-4, 476-7, 481, 483, 485-6, 488-492, 494, 496-505, 508-524. There’s plenty of more vocal music in the queue, including almost 20 hours of cantatas and the Mass in B Minor.
These songs were sourced from a few albums, but I’ll feature the album art with the pretty pink hue and the Vermeer, from the Bach 333 set (YouTube):
Here are highlights:
I’m not yet sick of Peter Schreier, are you?
Peter in BWV 467:
And in BWV 476, just the greatest tenor:
Magdalena Kožená ethereal in BWV 501:
In BWV 463, we hear Hilde Rössel-Majdan, who sounds like an extremely serious person, and looks like one, too. Great singing here.
Here’s Hilde again in BWV 483:
Creamy bass from Klaus Mertens, with Ton Koopman in BWV 505:
The melody of BWV 508 is very famous — you may have heard this on a Three Tenors CD if you (or your mother) are of a certain age — but this song is now known to have been written by Gottfried Stölzel, and adapted by JSB. It’s too good not to share, though, especially with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing:
Lieberson again in BWV 509, with a very surprising flatted note in the last sung measure, which I’ve circled in red.
The oddest piece by Bach I’ve heard this year is the Quodlibet of BWV 524, which does not strike me as JSB at all… more like opera buffa? Midway through we get the line, ‘If you think a woman is bad, a baking trough is much worse.’ What even is this? The Netherlands Bach Society plays it for laughs:
The Quodlibet heard at the end of the video is of course the finale of the Goldberg Variations, whose comedy benefits from the sung texts (which are not included in the published keyboard Variations).