Word: bache
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...eternal mystery is that an artist who seemed to his contemporaries so backward-looking should seem to his successors so forward-looking. Compared with Monteverdi or Beethoven or Schoenberg, he was not an innovator. Historically Bach's distinction was to summarize and culminate all the musical developments that led up to him. But he did this with such subtlety and daring, such piety and passion, that he ended up reconciling, completing and extending everything he touched, thereby preparing music for the centuries ahead. It has been said that the history of philosophy consists of a series of footnotes...
...proof, music lovers have only to look around them and listen this Christmas-in churches and concert halls, on campuses and in record stores, in homes and on the streets. Then they, too, can say with Frederick the Great: "Old Bach is here...
...greatness of Bach has been recognized for more than a century. But in all likelihood no prior age has better appreciated the true nature of his gifts. Musicologists have brought his works into clearer focus by editing his scores and clarifying their historic and esthetic background. Today's performers, heirs to the Baroque revival of recent decades, have a better sense of 18th century style, and instinctively reject the romantic excesses of the past. The advent of the LP has created a vast new audience for Bach, as it has for other composers; but Bach is a special beneficiary...
Never does he seem more so than at Christmas. A devout Lutheran who spent much of his life in the service of the church, Bach wrote more than 1,000 works, according to the definitive Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) catalogue. Nearly three-quarters of these were intended to be performed at Christian worship-including a Magnificat and 41 Christmas cantatas (plus six more that make up the famed Christmas oratorio). Even in the secularist atmosphere of the 20th century, his music rings with what Toronto Choral Conductor Elmer Iseler calls a positive, "D-major feeling about life." From the evidence...
...three cantatas for the BBC from St. Andrew's Church in Holborn. In Manhattan, Violinist and Conductor Alexander Schneider completes a two-concert series of cantatas and concertos at Carnegie Hall. And in New York, as in other major capitals, the coming weeks will see a performance of Bach's undoubted masterpiece, the B-Minor Mass-a work that he began as a tribute to the Catholic King of Poland, but which in its final form did not fit either the Catholic or the Lutheran liturgy. In English-speaking countries, the wide-ranging appeal of such performances threatens...