Word: bache
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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...
Perhaps more significant than such major concerts by well-known artists are the thousands of more modest Bach performances, ranging down to the smallest towns and the merest amateur level. Here Bach is pervasive. Following the pattern set by the present-day chorus at Bach's own St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, church and community choirs throughout the Western world are marking Christmas by singing something of Bach's, even if only a two-minute chorale. And what church organist will let Christmas-or any other week-go by without playing at least one Bach prelude or perhaps...
Church or concert, Christmas or midsummer, there is one striking thing about the new audience for Bach. It is young. At the weekly Bach cantata performances at Manhattan's Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, the congregation sports more beards than button-downs, appears to be almost entirely under 35. "Students will brave rainstorms to wait in line for standing room at a Bach recital," marvels German Organist Helmut Walcha. Record stores report a marked increase in the number of teen-agers thronging around the classical counters, buying up Bach without so much as a glance at the new Beatles album...
...prevalence of youthful Bachniks, says Music Critic Bernard Jacobson of the Chicago Daily News, explains why "the rise in Bach's popularity has not brought about an increase in the amount of Bach at symphony concerts, where all the subscribers are 90 years old. Bach is a revolutionary figure, allied with the liberals, while Beethoven, the archrevolutionary, has become the bulwark of the conservative establishment...