Most of my blog and tweet writing is often done listening to Bach. Partitas, concertos, inventions, toccatas, fugues and more.
I like the post-Gould era, and the Gould era, but only Glenn Gould’s interpretation. I recommend a steady diet of pre-and post-Gould for the uninitiated. Then cram nothing but Gould for a month, and you’ll see why I consider them separate. I must binge listen to Gould on a regular basis! The Gould devotees could not truly approximate Glenn Gould, sadly. He was a genius, and we probably will not see another like him ever again.
Let Gould be Gould – the rest of you let Bach be Bach.
Nicholas Reicher
I think classical musicologists would agree with that statement.
I think back to my mother’s collection of Deutch Gramophone’s box sets of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and more. It would be really a great moment to find an estate sale of some classical nerd with the entire library. One of the first CD’s my wife and I bought together was Oleg Kagen’s last recording, the Bach violin concertos. Sadly, his bow was not resin’ed well and it began to shriek towards the end of the recording. Why nobody prepped up a different bow to hand to him I don’t know. Other than that, it is a stellar performance.
I’ve tried to separate composers by days – German one day, French another, Italian on a third day. It doesn’t work. You’ve just got to include them all together.
I guess my classical interpretation is, “If it ain’t baroque – fix it.” Although I can listen to classical composers and romantic era composers as well. But there’s something about Baroque.
Modern classical usually gets a pass from me, which is why I can’t listen to most classical music stations – they take a snobbish tone to the good composers as “popular” and spend all their energy and time trying to force me to listen to people who’ve mastered the forms and techniques of classical, and yet can’t seem to write anything resembling music – Holst excepted (Mars, anyone? One of my favorite pieces).
But Bach reigns supreme. Beethoven storms, Mozart charms, but Bach is grand, intelligent, reaching heights that would not ever be challenged by others. Indeed, he used chords in his music that would not be repeated again until the 20th century. It’s no surprise that both Mozart and Beethoven wrote music in the progression of (using German music notation) “B A C H”.
