Three Bach concerts

To an innocent lad from the provinces, classical music was orchestral music, and Bach’s name only appeared on Philadelphia Orchestra programs when the orchestra played transcriptions of his organ works. I didn’t begin to appreciate Bach’s contribution until I started listening to Baroque music and encountered the instrumental music he created for small, 18th-century instrumental ensembles.

Historically, the Bach revival began in 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn presented the first performance of the St. Matthew Passion, after Bach had been neglected for decades. For people like me, the revival really took off in the last 30 years, with the proliferation of Baroque music groups.

Merry Bach-mas

Three Philadelphia music organizations presented Bach concerts during December. The Tempesta di Mare concert that opened the series presented a first-class example of the instrumental music that ignited my own fascination with Bach — his Triple Concerto in A Minor for flute, violin, and harpsichord. Tempesta placed Bach in his historical context by presenting the concerto with pieces by his friend G.P. Telemann and his son C.P.E. Bach (who was also Telemann’s godson).

Telemann is one of the great composers of the Baroque, and Gwyn Roberts gave his Concerto in G one of the best performances of a recorder concerto I’ve heard. But you could feel the jump to new heights as soon as the orchestra followed the Telemann with the opening bars of the Bach concerto. Bach leaped out of the starting gate with all his bounce, drive, and inventiveness going full blast. Telemann was a master composer who adapted to the changes in style and taste that took place during his lifetime. Bach stuck to the older styles, but his irrepressible creativity transformed them into a unique, highly personal legacy.

The universal in the parochial

The other Bach programs focused on his vocal religious works. On December 17, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society presented the Gamut Bach Ensemble performing two “dialogue cantatas” with excerpts from other religious works. On December 31, Choral Arts Philadelphia presented a rare performance of the entire Christmas Oratorio. The two concerts highlighted one of the major reasons for Bach’s stature: the universality that emerges from a very parochial religious view.

Many of the texts in these works emphasize a form of Christianity that is preoccupied with personal salvation — the belief that a personal relationship with Jesus will rescue your soul from hell and lead you to an eternal afterlife in heaven. In the dialogue cantatas, the texts include dialogues between the Soul and Jesus that compare the relationship to courtship and marriage. It’s a view of Christianity that seems equally remote to areligious people like myself and to many contemporary Christians. Most of us feel more comfortable with the aspects of Christianity that emphasize texts like “Love thy neighbor as thyself” and “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

The Christmas Oratorio consists of six cantatas that incorporate the standard texts on the birth of Christ, but it also includes extra texts that celebrate the personal-salvation mode. Yet, in spite of the alien religious bent of the work, Choral Arts filled most of the 500 seats at the Episcopal Cathedral in West Philadelphia, even on December 31, from 4 to 8pm. The crowd all seemed glad they had come.

Embellishments and emotions

The critical factor is, of course, Bach’s music. He’s constantly surprising you with little touches, unexpected shifts in direction, and instrumental obbligatos that counterpoint and embellish the moods of the arias. And all that musical creativity communicates emotions we can all relate to.

The last cantata in the Gamut Bach Ensemble program ended with a celebration of death, as the liberated soul flies to heaven, but it’s a stirring finale, even if the longing for death seems bizarre to a modern listener. You can respond to the emotion itself, just as you can share the celebration at the end of the Christmas Oratorio, even if you can’t share the reason for the celebration.

There are a lot of things I could say to compare and contrast these three concerts and the musicians who produced them. The Bach Gamut Ensemble played modern instruments, for example, and the other two groups played historical instruments. You can have a lot of fun arguing the pros and cons of the two approaches.

But if somebody asked me why these concerts were major events in my December rounds, I would start by discussing Bach’s creativity and universality. Whatever you’re feeling, whether you’re mourning or celebrating, or just feeling reasonably content with your life, Bach has probably written the music for it. You can supply your own words.