Word: bache
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...DISCUSSION of accurate performance practice for Bach's music has intensified steadily over the past few years. Various organizations lay claims to all manner of historically-precise techniques. The Munich Bach Choir lies somewhere in the center of the spectrum, between the advocates of absolute musical historicity and the traditionalists. The Choir's performance of the B-Minor Mass makes a powerful argument for just the vital elements of Bach's composition with a firm command of standard nineteenth-century technique...
Sheer size is a clear departure from the actual forces available in Bach's time for an indoor performance. Richter's ensemble numbers 140 singles and orchestral personnel; Bach's optimum number was less than half that. The Bach Choir's is a modern one, a product of the great symphonies after 1800. Between Bach's time and our own, instruments were generally engineered to be louder and more precise in pitch. Those listening to a cantata in the 1730's were not steeped in a tradition of massive sound; the scale of volume-production then was a fraction...
...balance, too, the Choir excelled. Rather than a collection of sopranos with others, it was a true equality of vocal parts so necessary to Bach's complex polyphony. Richter generally chose legato articulation, but the choir handled the staccato Pleni sunt coeli passage with case. The attention paid their conductor is yet another point: Richter varied his tempi suddenly, but singers and orchestra followed right along...
...Bach Choir presented an idealized--doubters might say distorted or impossible--image of the Mass. Far larger than the composer himself could have imagined this was not a purist's performance. It was honest enough to appreciate its own potential: valveless trumpets, natural horns, and wooden flutes all would have been senseless against a modern string section and mixed (rather than all-male) chorus. An unhappy marriage of old with new produces a far less satisfying result than either extreme followed completely...
...CONSIDERED A stroke of genius when Perry Miller compared I.S. Bach to Jonathan Edwards, but when George Henry played Robert Schumann in accompaniment with Dunnock's readings, the genius was not so striking. Schumann's works did, however, evoke the internal tensions of the poetry in a way that Mildred Dunnock's voice...