May 13: 4-Part Chorales (Vocalconsort Berlin; Daniel Reuss, conductor)

Too many tapas.

Bach wrote several hundred minute-long four-part chorales, little wisps of musical ideas that come and go like life itself. These were performed during church services to help frame the liturgy in music.

The chorales are great, but listening to sixty of them in a row is disconcerting. It’s like all you can eat tapas: too much of not enough.

I took in this set while walking through my neighborhood, sundress weather finally blessing the metro area. (The second seventy degree day officially kicks off the one week each year when New Yorkers are happy.)

This was the wrong setting for chorale jamming. I had trouble shutting off the monkey mind, and I’d find myself daydreaming and needing to repeat tracks I’d just missed.

Where did my mind go? Zillow, municipal water drainage, sex, my desire for greater intellectual rigor at my synagogue, money, puns, self-flaggelations about my diet, things I’d said and regretted from my youth to the present, musings about the fate of cemeteries in a thousand years, and then ten thousand years.

The usual.

By track 50, the music had become totally incoherent to me that I had to start over back home.

This recording is booming with reverb, as it was recorded live in a church, the place where you’re supposed to be listening to these pieces. You should be staring at the crucifix, thinking about the son of God dying for your sins as the music reifies your supplication. You should not be walking slightly faster than normal to “get some cardio in,” with a hi-res lossless stream wirelessly jacked into your skull via noise cancelling earbuds that mute the gentle lapping of the Long Island Sound.

Where this album was recorded, Church of St. Thekla (Welden, Germany)

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I’m covering the third collected set of chorales from the Bach 333 megabox. The performance is by the Vocalconsort Berlin, conducted by Daniel Reuss, and released in 2018. (Links to my writeup of Volumes One and Two; streaming links to Volume III: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music; this collection features BWV’s 20/11, 257-258, 382-438.)

My favorite moment of this collection, from BWV 407, lingers in long suspensions, really beautiful:

Exquisite harmony to close BWV 20/11:

Low register goodness throughout BWV 402:

Love the reverberating high G in the second measure BWV 384, leaving overtones hanging over the next few bars. The lyrics translate to, “Do not be so mournful, do not be so very troubled, my soul.”

A quick celebration for the elegant restraint of the lute and organ, who both fill out the sound and balance the SATB in BWV 258:

In BWV 432, there’s a passing note that’s so great at 0:09 in the clip below. Bach taps the brakes with one foot while the gas pedal is still depressed by the other, to use an analogy that would make absolutely no sense to him.

There are so many little moments like this throughout the Bach canon — the uncovering is its own reward.