Word: bache
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...perfectly captured the spiritual momentum of Bach's music...
...severity, Tureck's playing is Victorian in its embellishments when compared with Gould's quiet intimacy with Bach. Because Gould, 31, is convinced that the bigness of modern concert halls is a harmful anachronism for music designed for parlors, he gives his deepest efforts to his recordings. With a piano on which the stroke of each key has been shortened a fraction of an inch to make its action more like that of a harpsichord, Gould works tirelessly at recording sessions, positioning the microphone so close to the piano that his constant contrapuntal humming sometimes comes through...
...Large Things. It was an intrusion of passion that lifted Bach's work above that of hundreds of other North German cantors of his day. Bach was born in Eisenach, a town in the Thuringian forest of Germany, dominated by the medieval castle of the Wartburg, where Luther translated the Bible into German. Orphaned in 1695 when he was only nine, he spent his youth as a choirboy, violinist and organist. By the time he arrived in Weimar in his mid-20s, he was already an outstanding organist, and during his years there he developed into the finest organist...
...Weimar Bach found an artistic guide in the music of Vivaldi. For nine years he studiously copied Vivaldi violin concertos and arranged them for organ and clavier. He also wrote fugues based on themes by lesser Italian composers-Corelli, Legrenzi, Albinoni-and gained a fresh sense of line-the ability to say large things with an economy and clarity that his baroque predecessors had never been able to achieve...
...Bach's rhythmic notions and his adventuresome ear for melody seem amazingly modern to today's musicians, but in his own time he was considered hopelessly demode. He was the last great voice of concerted polyphonic music, a style that had lasted since the early 17th century. The very forms Bach favored-the fugue, the church cantata, the motet-were outmoded even as he worked on them. "Old Wig," one son called him, and Bach in his later years sadly agreed. "My art," he said, "has become old-fashioned...