For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter (conductor, 1926-1981). I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. After the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and just as spontaneously said: “Anyone who has heard this knows that the faith is true.”
Joseph Ratzinger, “Wounded By the Arrow of Beauty”, in On the Way to Jesus Christ.
Catholic Phoenix encourages readers to take advantage of a week-long series of concerts and recitals sponsored by the homegrown Arizona Bach Festival, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to the live performance of works by J.S. Bach in Phoenix. As in the previous two years of early-January concerts, the Bach Festival is again mixing out-of-state talent with local musicians for the concert series, drawing heavily for the latter category on the personnel of the Phoenix Chorale and Phoenix Symphony, under the direction of All Saints’ Episcopal music director Scott Youngs. (You can visit the Festival website here, and purchase tickets on-line as well.)
This year, the culminating full-choir-with-orchestra concert on Saturday evening is the massive St. John Passion, a three-hour work that is actually the lesser of Bach’s two extant musical dramatizations of the Lord’s arrest, trial, and death. For those who lack what Luther called adequate Sitzfleisch (loosely translated: “seat-meat”) to brave this year’s long culminating concert on the hardwood pews of Central United Methodist Church, there are three other slightly more accessible concerts remaining this week:
Monday: a recital by young New York-based pianist Evan Shinners, including the complete Partita in B Minor (BWV 831).
Tuesday: a small-ensemble concert, featuring sometime-Phoenix Chorale alto Karen Knudsen, singing selections from 8 different sacred cantatas, with organ, cello, violin, and oboe.
Thursday: the big Baroque orchestra playing the Violin Concerto in A minor (BWV 1041), Orchestral Suite 1 in C (BWV 1066), and what is sure to be one of this Festival’s highlights, Brandenburg Concerto 5 (BWV 1050). Australian violinist Emily Dupere is featured, along with local soloists Stephen Redfield (violin), Baroque flute specialist Kiann Mapes, and harpsichordist Guy Whatley (music director at Camelback Bible Church).
This year’s Festival began at All Saints’ on Sunday with an organ recital by 26-year old German Wunderkind Felix Hell, and it was worth the price of admission alone just to hear his opening selection, the justly-familiar Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565), or as my 9-year old son calls it, “the Captain Nemo music”:
(Ah, yes: the distant days when Disney movies used to introduce children to Bach, instead of Tim Rice and Elton John.)
In addition to this well-trodden yet spectacular piece, Hell played two short and mellow choral preludes, two more pyrotechnic toccata-and-fugues (including the “Wedge” in E minor, BWV 548), a three-movement Trio Sonata, and the program’s most elaborate composition, a choral partita (BWV 768) that took a basic theme from what would have been a familiar hymn in the composer’s day (“Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig”) and elaborated upon it in an increasingly complex and bold series of variations.
The sanctuary at All Saints’ was set up with a video projection on the wall that enabled the concert audience to watch organist Hell work the keyboards and bass pedals of the massive organ at All Saints’, the pipes of which, in good Baroque tradition, completely concealed the virtuoso musician from normal view in the sanctuary. This video view was a welcome enrichment of the (secular) concert experience, for watching the organist’s feet and hands perform their separate tasks certainly helped the ear to untangle the independent melodic lines that characterize Bach’s polyphonic compositional style.
The following video is NOT of Felix Hell’s hands and feet—but it does, in its own way, provide a visual aid for the non-music reader to understanding what is going on in the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Enjoy it—and support the Arizona Bach Festival.
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