Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Sinfonia in D major (1775) H 651
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach Sinfonia in B flat major
JS Bach arr. Wilhelm Friedemann Bach Cantata ‘Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen’ (c. 1750)
Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach Sinfonia in D minor (1768) WFV I:3
Johann Christian Bach La Tempesta (scena by Metastasio, 1773) W G16
This was the final concert of the 2015-2016 season of the Academy of Ancient Music at the Barbican, where the orchestra has been an Associate Ensemble since 2012, alongside its residency at the University of Cambridge. The season saw the conclusion of a three-year cycle of Monteverdi’s operas, a principal-player focus with concerts like Music from the Dark Side and Angel and Saints directed by the AAM principal violinists, and this exciting new collaboration with the ‘early music icon’ Reinhard Goebel (Süddeutsche Zeitung).
Familiarity. I have been an aficionado of Goebel’s specialised approach to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertoires since my teenage years. As a violinist and founder of Musica Antiqua Köln, an ensemble he directed for over thirty years, Goebel’s recordings have influenced generations of musicians, scholars and enthusiasts of music from this period. And it is this extraordinary personal journey as an early music interpreter that gave shape to last night’s AAM concert, entitled The Bach Family. In the early 2000s, Musica Antiqua Köln undertook an exploration of JS Bach’s musical roots and legacy with a project that culminated in two CDs titled Bachiana (Music by the Bach Family Archiv 471150, 2001; and Double Concertos Archiv 471579, 2003). The impulse for the project had come from the rediscovery in Kiev in 1999 of a section of JS Bach’s estate containing music by earlier family members. Although Goebel did not mention this in the pre-concert talk, his long-standing experience unearthing stories and music by today-less-known ‘Bachs’ is what made for a remarkable evening with him, the AAM and the soprano Lucy Crowe.
Music practicalities. Among the advantages of a perspective on the Bach family, is an opportunity to better appreciate the historical context in which these musicians operated. As Goebel remarked to the audience, about 80 musicians in one single family spanning over 250 years can hardly be just an unusual concentration of musical gifts. It bespeaks a culture where music was thought as a craft to be learnt within the family, so that the careers of male family members were often decided from early childhood. The majority of them, JS Bach included, were employed as church musicians or composers in miniature courts of the politically split central Germany of the time. The music they wrote and performed was largely determined by their duties at these institutions, and particularly by the need to constantly provide music for services and events from one week to the following.
A sense of this routine, and the business-like attitude these musicians must have had in dealing with it, is well captured in the programme of this AAM concert. The first piece by CPE Bach is an adaptation of one of his own string symphonies from 1756, which in 1775 while in Hamburg the composer decided to rescore with full wind parts and timpani to fit the needs of his latest appointment, rather than composing an entirely new symphony. Goebel spoke of a similar ‘laziness’ – but in reality a sense of practicality that any music professional would show in this period – in the case of JS Bach’s eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann. The latter inherited some of his father’s manuscript cantatas and used them in his own performances after retouching them according to his needs and available resources. So the unusually virtuosic BWV 51 Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen, composed by JS Bach in 1730 for solo soprano and trumpet, was rearranged in 1750 by WF Bach to be performed with a second trumpet and timpani. The addition made the piece even more difficult to sing in terms of volume balances between the voice and the ensemble. This came across in the AAM concert especially during the first aria, where in a few passages the beautiful voice of Lucy Crowe struggled to compete with the rest of the instruments combined. Although for different reasons, this impression also persisted in the second aria of the cantata, of a more intimate character. Here the choice to use the entire continuo section (all the cellos and basses, together with the harpsichord) seemed to overemphasize the accompaniment line over the solo voice. However, the balance was effectively tailored in the ‘Chorale’ and concluding ‘Alleluja’ movements, and Crowe succeeded in conveying astonishingly expressive touches throughout the cantata.
Personality clashes. ‘Every programme tells a story’, the AAM Chief Executive Ed Hossack reminded us in his introduction to this concert. The Bach Family offered a narrative not about the family’s entire span over the centuries, but on just four sons of JS Bach who were born within a period of 25 years: Wilhelm Friedemann (1710), Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714), Johann Christoph Friedrich (1731) and Johann Christian (1735). This narrower purview allowed the audience at the pre-concert talk, and later during the concert, to follow more closely the four brothers’ personal narratives and styles. Their different personalities almost seemed to come to life through the anecdotes Goebel told – or rather acted for us – and in the vivid musical portraits he carved during the performance.
A theatrical atmosphere reigned throughout the evening, not least thanks to the programme’s musical variety. The alternation of instrumental and vocal music worked brilliantly, much in the spirit of a typically mixed eighteenth-century concert programme, whose halves both began with a symphony. Yet, a succession of well-shaped and at times contrasting characters resulted especially from the varied means that Goebel and Crowe devised to depict them. In these impersonations, Carl Philipp Emanuel sounded eager, almost rushed as the movements of his symphony were played with no interruptions, and the concluding Presto with fast repeated triplets appeared to stop as if truncated, yielding no concluding gesture. Wilhelm Friedemann gave a much more reflective impression, with abundant time taken between the movements to appreciate the work’s own beautiful intricacy; it felt as if the piece was listening to itself (I give further consideration to this piece below). In his talk Goebel somewhat dismissed Johann Christoph Friedrich for having spent a sedentary career in Bückeburg, a small court in Lower Saxony. Educational tours outside the region, however, were uncommon for the Bachs and the journeys of the fourth son in the programme, Johann Christian, to Italy, London and Manheim represent the exception. Goebel’s interpretation of JCF Bach’s Sinfonia in D minor seemed to give justice to this ‘settled’ personality, as described in Sandy Burnett’s programme notes. And yet, the fact that the ensemble was reduced to strings only, together with the piece’s conventional galant gestures and its minor key, made the ‘Bückeburg Bach’ sound as a beautifully unpretentious ‘second movement’ of the entire concert. The last Bach to take the stage offered another stark contrast, as this time the audience was transported to the glamour of the London and Mannheim courts in the 1770s. Through the prism of Goebel’s interpretation, his ‘evening’s favourite’ Johann Christian (as the conductor called him), appeared in all the exuberance gained during his travels and international experiences. Crowe added a virtuosic sparkle and dramatic nuances, making for a grandiose close to the concert.
Music ‘recently discovered’. I have always been sceptical whenever interpreters address the audience brandishing a manuscript in their hands to claim they themselves recently unearthed the music we are about to hear. Claims of this kind risk being empty attention-grabbers (after all, our libraries are packed with music awaiting its first modern performance) or playing into a dated stereotype of today’s interpreters of early music. A freshly rediscovered piece performed on period instruments used to be seen as the ideal set for re-establishing an unmediated, ‘authentic’ link with music practices of the past. At first, then, I was not sure how to take the news that the symphony by Wilhelm Friedemann in the programme was recently found by a former student of Goebel, who granted him exclusive performance rights for two years. During the concert, however, I was utterly struck by the piece and its interpretation, which became my highlight of the evening.
WF Bach’s Sinfonia in B flat major for strings only uses extensive ornamentation and dialogue between the parts, constantly playing with the listener’s expectation by delaying, eluding and even vanishing altogether the resolution of harmonic progressions or effects. Here the AAM musicians exhibited a masterful control of their ensemble interplay, giving the impression that the conductor’s presence had little to do with keeping them together. Rather, what they appeared to absorb from Goebel was his familiarity with the various members of the Bach family, resulting from many ‘personal encounters’ with them through new sources, anecdotes about their lives or compositions, concerts and recordings across several years. In this sense, the anecdote on the symphony’s rediscovery made the evening at the Barbican resonate with these encounters, such as the Kiev discovery, the Bachiana recordings and Musica Antiqua Köln; in other words, Goebel’s history with the Bachs. In the true spirit of the Academy of Ancient Music, the entire evening was electrified by the historical knowledge, liveliness and personalities of all the artists taking part. I can only hope that this encounter between Goebel and the AAM is to be the first of many.
The Academy of Ancient Music performed at Barbican Hall, London, on 18th June 2016.