Word: bache
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...period before Bach was long the Atlantis of musical history: an entire realm sunk into oblivion, remembered only in legend. The poets, painters and architects of the time-roughly the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance-had been gloriously gifted; it stood to reason that the musicians had been too. Yet there was scant record of what their work sounded like. The scores that survived were in archaic, sometimes cryptic notation. The original instruments-for instance, the sackbut, a precursor of the trombone, and the shawm, a sort of oboe with a cold-often were found only among museum relics...
...march-and-swing ensemble that his father Edwin had founded in 1911, he started out pursuing loftier strains by studying composition and teaching at Manhattan's Juilliard School. When he took over the 56-member band in 1956, he had it play classics by Berlioz and Bach as well as newly commissioned pieces by U.S. composers-among them Goldman himself, who was as adept at rousing marches as he was at "serious" fare...
Johann Christian Bach: Six Symphonies, Op. 3 (Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Neville Marriner conductor, Philips). Marriner has made more than 200 recordings with this London chamber orchestra, most of them in the pre-1800 repertory and quite a few of them models of punctilious, shapely interpretation. Never more so than here. These modest works by Bach's youngest son are lively, economical and flowering with the charm of a style that is well along the path leading from his august father to Mozart...
...Bach: Magnificat. Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms (Deutsche Oper Chorus, Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan conductor, Deutsche Grammophon). This is an apt pairing: a monument of the Baroque and a modern masterpiece whose liturgical austerity looks back to precedents in the Baroque and earlier. Karajan's Bach, velvety and well turned, may not be for purists, but the Stravinsky seems just right, with its tart syncopations dancing beneath a lustrous choral hymn of praise...
...P.D.Q. Bach: Black Forest Bluegrass (Vanguard). Composer Peter Schickele's latest burlesque features Blaues Gras, a hilarious collision between a stately 18th century cantata and some mean pickin' and strummin'. It just shows what Spike Jones could have done if he had gone to Juilliard...