I'm trying very hard to listen to Bach tonight and can only find myself getting mad at the 'HIP wars' forty years after they reached their zenith (when I was -1 years old...). The amount of empty noise this issue generates could fill more CD's than Bach's complete works.
So here's finally something that drowns the noise out: substance rather than style. The B-Minor Mass on the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, HIP influenced but sung by the Tomanerchor and played by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. One is the choir Bach conducted for thirty years, the other the orchestra with which Mendelssohn 're-premiered' the St. Matthew Passion. Literally hundreds of years of inherited practical wisdom of how to play this work is passed from generation to generation. The fact that any authenticity other than this can be claimed both by any freelance group of musicians with some different instruments, or by any egotistical conductor who wants to burnish his repertoire resume with Bach he's studied for a few hours, is a scandal.
What Bach expresses is the peculiar Protestant ecstasy of the early reformed Church, in which the possibilities of history were yet again fresh and unspoiled. This is the spiritual need which all Bach performances must convey. There can never be more than a hint of the decadent in Bach, because were there anything decadent about Bach’s music, the early Protestants would have repressed it.
So many HIP groups seem as though their way is revolutionary, but so much of what's revolutionary about them is what is done in the control room. Notions that couldn't possibly work live like the B-Minor Mass done one-to-a-part singers sound as though they work because the singers are electronically amplified. Instrumentalists who sound as though they are impeccably virtuosic are the result of constant retakes and airbrushes. There is no question that after fifty years, the musical abilities of its practitioners have improved enormously, but the stories of HIP incompetence in the recording industry are common knowledge.
On the other hand, this is so far from an example of the old-school elephantitis that drew the B-Minor Mass out to 2 1/2 hours and made Bach such a chore with underrehearsed orchestras unfamiliar with the music and gigantic amateur choirs who couldn't possibly sing the polyphony. The old way of playing Bach was as big a scandal as what replaced them. Bach would have thrown Scherchen from a bell tower and may even have impaled Karajan on a steeple.
This is Bach with the music as sole focus. Hell, even the occasional slipups; interpolated dynamics and self-conscious mannerisms, hooty soloists, flubbed horn notes, tentative entrances, slips in string coordination, out of tune boy sopranos, feel as entirely authentic as the smudges on a Grünewald.- not to mention the properly Hochdeutsch Latin. There is nothing more infuriating than a B-Minor Mass which crosses every t and dots every eye to get the instrumental make and techniques exactly authentic, the exact vocal ornamentations and inflections Bach meant, only to pronounce the Latin as though they're living in Paris or Rome. When I hear this, there is not a doubt in my mind: THIS is Bach as he is meant: a statement directly from the early Protestant church, neither romanticized nor baroquen, with neither the aristocratic sensuality of Monteverdi nor the martial grandeur of Handel. It expresses an entirely bourgeois ecstasy from the land of Luther. It resounds with the sense of pride which Bach’s contemporaries got from having tilled their fields for 17 hours every day before they spent six hours posing for a Rembrandt painting so they could sleep at night for a half-hour and spend three minutes around midnight impregnating their wives.
The only answer for how to play Bach is simply to play him. Don't just forget all the research, forget all the arguments against the research too. Just play him as though this is your first encounter with Bach, and use the basic musical judgement which any good musician should have, and whether the results are as enormous as Peter Schreier and Robert Shaw or even old Karl Richter, or as HIP as Mazaaki Suzuki or Vaclav Luks or Rene Jacobs (stunningly restrained in Bach...), or as hybrid as Helmuth Rilling and Nikolaus Harnoncourt (why Harnoncourt was preferable to so many other early HIPsters is its own book-length thesis which doubtless has already been written...), just play him as though he's great music, nothing more, certainly nothing less, and, lo and behold, great music speaks for itself. Out of charity, I shall omit the names of the worst HIP transgressors.
FYI, as an added bonus at the beginning, this performance is preceded by one of the most gorgeous Pentacostal hymns I've ever heard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFSX9vnMST0
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