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Bach is my favourite composer but for some reason I never really explored his more religious works. A few years ago I bought these 2 works the Mass in B minor and the mass in G major on EMI classics by Jochum & Linde and I have listened to them a few times, but after a while I get bored, I just find it too monotonous.
Maybe I should try different versions?? Thus I need your recommendations!
Good audio is also a prerequisite.
Edits: 03/09/12Follow Ups:
Been listening to lots clips online today and finally decided on the version by Marc Minkowski (Conductor), Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble
on the Naive label.
It is a small scale affair which seems to be to my tastes, it was recommended by KAS and I know from past experience that we seem to be on the same wave length.
I also bought the 9 cds box set by Gardiner from an Amazon seller for under 20$.
Thanks again
I think that the work should be heard in both large-scale and stripped down versions. I like the Jeremy Rifkin version that utilizes only single singers for each vocal part (e.g., the baritones in a choir being represented by only a single voice).
I have not heard the Minkowski, but, I bet it will be quite a nice version (almost everything issued by Naive is terrific musically and in terms of recording quality).
I like the Jochum/EMI if I want "big Bach," since it's well played and not lumbering like Klemperer's recording.
For a performance with more reasonable forces and PLENTY of energy and good singing, I like this one with "The Sixteen" conducted by Harry Christopher:
http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=129523
Which doesn't help.
I do really like this version though:
Really want to hear an AMAZING B.C.? Get a copy of this:
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And Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir came to Tucson the next night to perform the Mass in B Minor.
Light, clear textures; agile, lithe pacing. It was a wonderful performance, but I thought having the Kyrie, the Gloria, and the Credo ALL in the first half was a bit much to absorb.
They filled Centennial Hall, the big barn of an auditorium at the University of Arizona, very nicely; unfortunately, it looked like there were only about 800 or so in attendance.
Maybe Tucsonans were "Massed out"--the Tucson Symphony on Friday evening and Sunday afternoon presented their first performances ever of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. And, to add to the general cultural overload, the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival has been underway, along with the Tucson Festival of Books on Saturday and Sunday. I guess we're still in the peak of Tucson's cultural season....
The Beserkley performance wasn't sold out, but the Hall was pretty full and the audience VERY enthusiastic. The first part did get pretty
intense, then a break for nearly 20 minutes to sell vino I suppose and then the last 20 minutes. Bad timing for a break and they should have
just played through; we could have handled it!
Ton Koopman was having a great time!
I agree about the pacing and the performance here was also wonderful and satisfying. I thought the choir was particularly sublime.
Would have preferred to hear it in the local Church where Cal Performances books some of their programs. The acoustics in the Church
are much more warmly hospitable than the more neutral/concrete Zellerbach.
Glad you also enjoyed it; it's a marvelous experience!
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Like one poster said below...maybe Baroque and Classical period music is just not for you. I've tried to listen to Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Vivaldi and other earlier composers - but anything composed before the 1840's or so, just doesn't grab me. Most of it I find to be too light...and repetitive to the point of being monotonous. Mozart especially, is like listening to tree frogs and crickets chirp for an hour. Give me Wagner, Saint-Saens, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius instead.
You never know.
Note that a post in response is preferred.
Warmest
Timothy Bailey
The Skyptical Mensurer and Audio Scrounger
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach - Chaucer. ;-)!
'Still not saluting.'
It's possible that you really aren't attuned to the Baroque and Classical era composers, but as others have suggested, it may also be that you're listening to the wrong recordings. There's a lot of very dull and unimaginative playing available on records (especially of Mozart and Haydn), and unfortunately, it's often done by big-name artists on major labels, which means that such recordings are often "recommended" on various lists, often by people who actually haven't heard them.
I love baroque music, and as I said Bach is most probably my fav composer
with Haydn, I enjoy most classical music but I did not explore the more
religious side of it, such as the masses.
Their is plenty classical music interpretations I find boring and I am always looking for the ones played with passion.
I can hear a lot to be liked in the Mass in B minor but the Jochum leaves me cold thus my question.
Hmmm. Mozart is, after Bach, the least repetitive composer ever. And the B minor Mass is anything but light! It's one of the grandest works ever penned. No, make that *the* grandest.
I don't now how much you've listened to the earlier music, but it has a more complex syntax than anything on your list, except, in his more inspired moments, Wagner. As such, it requires more effort on the part of the listener -- in the form of lots of listening -- to have an effect. But the effect is commensurately more profound, and well worth it.
"If only I could impress Mozart's inimitable works on the soul of every friend of music, and the souls of high personages in particular, as deeply, with the same musical understanding and with the same deep feeling, as I understand and feel them, the nations would vie with each other to possess such a jewel." - Haydn
Gardner on Archiv, Herreweghe on Harmonia Mundi and Suzuki on BIS.
Also, the Matthew Passion is Bach's greatest sacred music IMHO. And Gardner and Herreweghe aforementioned, are the best.
Also, the Motets conducted by Richard Marlow are great.
Also, the Gardner boxed set of Haydn Masses is good.
BTW: The Jochum bores me, too.
.
I'll see if it's in my library loan system.
and I haven't heard any other but I found this set pretty captivating for the genre.
Thanks, this is the one I have been thinking about.
As a performer of Bach's music for mor than 50 years I can assure you I know of no-one who finds HIP to diminish the music or limit it.
Quite the opposite.
The music becomes far more expressive, more dynamic, richer, and far more human.
Much more difficult? You bet. More open to interpretation, yes but within that as in what to bring out within each passage, and NOT about how heavily to lay on the trowel of rubato, wobble and THICKNESS.
If you love Jazz you should love HIP approaches, despite the nay-sayers here the expression is far richer and varied between and within HIP performances than between say Klemperer, Jochum or Munchinger.
The music and its players were as much working class as middle class and constantly pushed against the envelope of what those in charge wanted or could accept.
It is a good thing that this music was kept going by some musicians.
The instruments sounded more different from each other than their descendants (where they exist) do.
There is no modern equivalent for a cornet (a cow-horn split and glued, with a trumpet mouthpiece), or a basset horn, and all of these missing items were vital to the way the music was made.
Note that a post in response is preferred.
Warmest
Timothy Bailey
The Skyptical Mensurer and Audio Scrounger
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach - Chaucer. ;-)!
'Still not saluting.'
Hell, the Mass in B minor is one of the most exhilarating and emotionally engaging works of music ever penned. If you aren't getting this from a performance, it must be bad indeed.
While I've never heard his Mass, I'm not wild about Suzuki's cantata performances. I'd vote for the Klemperer, it's from a time before misapplied historical performance practices robbed the music of feeling, drama, and musicality and left it a dry, dessicated, jumpy thing.
Bullshit, and ignorant BOF _ I hate change - BS, at that.
I have been singing this pre-romantic music - at cathedral choir level since I was nine - 53 years ago.
IMO, HIP has been the best thing that has happened to classical music.
Performers have taken it on en-masse,
because it works.
But you can't? Who's the informed thinker here? NOT you.
The market has accepted it, too.
Klemperer's Bach is ponderous, slow, and excessively reverential - to the IDEA of BAAAAACCCHHHH!
His music, like Haydn's and Mozart's is vigorous, lithe, human, randy, loving, romantic, hungry, reverent to God and to being here, but not SLOW and HEAVY it is richly dynamic*, immensely complex*, funny, basic, rich and smelly. like life is.
* As another poster pointed out only Wagner and only occasionally, get's close on either front.
When HIP came along, I felt ROBBED as a performer by previous practice. And that's with Neville, and Argo, Loiseau Lyre, and Telefunken already happening in the early 1960s.
Are you sure you're into classical music for the challenge, which it should constantly be?
Take off the tie, and the suit, and BOOGIE, Josh!
Note that a post in response is preferred.
Warmest
Timothy Bailey
The Skyptical Mensurer and Audio Scrounger
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach - Chaucer. ;-)!
'Still not saluting.'
The B minor mass shouldn't be reverential?!? Timbo, you have got to be kidding!
I'm not into classical music for the challenge. I'm into it for the music. And I confess I don't much care whether performers take to something or not. What I care is whether the music touches me in the many ways that great music can.
If a backwards performance on a kazoo did that, I'd say, great.
Actually, in case it isn't clear (I did have a discussion of this here at great length a few weeks back), I have no objection to the use of original instruments -- a sound I often but don't always love. Or historically correct ornamentation. Or historical pitch, or Werckmeister III, which whether or not Bach actually used it is certainly interesting (the contemporary description of his tuning, and the presence of Werckmeister's tome in his library, are suggestive but not conclusive). Or to what is known of other historical practices, so long as they make musical and practical sense.
Which, unfortunately, they often do not.
An extreme example: harpsichord continuo in Carnegie Hall that YOU COULDN'T EVEN HEAR.
What, exactly, is historically informed about that?
Less extreme: Sending half the performers packing in a hall that is many times the size of the space for which the music was originally scored, and so robbing it of impact in an attempt to preserve purity of line.
But my real objection to the HIP movement is in the realm of interpretation. IMO, HIP interpretations have more to do with Rorscharch blotting a 20th century aesthetic onto partially-understood 18th- and 19th century practices than with historical versimilitude.
For one thing, it frequently doesn't even match the historical descriptions of the time.
Performance practice through the time of Mozart was extremely improvisatory. We are told by a reasonably credible source that Bach wrote out all his notes. But other composers did not. So what we hear are the musical skeletons of the works. And that aspect of performance is largely lost.
At least one baroque source says that there was a difference style of performance for religious works than for secular ones. Just as there is today, because it's the natural thing to do: a mass is not a dance tune. But you wouldn't guess that from listening to some of these "informed" performances.
We know that Bach favored the cantabile style of playing. In describing it, CPE Bach wrote of rubato in the right hand, played against a firm rhythm in the left. Like a singer, as the name implies. Instead we get playing that would do a player piano proud.
We have a blow-by-blow description of a few bars of Beethoven's piano playing. It is much more expressive, takes far more liberties, than any playing today.
But the bottom line for me is the musicality of the performances. So what if Bach played the B minor mass at a faster clip than Klemperer, as, since we're told that Bach took his tempi fast, he undoubtedly did? What matters is whether an interpretation works or not. And while I don't believe I'm quite as uninformed as you apparently think, that doesn't make any difference, because listening is what it is, and interpretation is something that you can't bottle. It comes from skill and training and study, yes, but also from an organic tradition, communicated by playing the music itself, shared between performer and audience, and from within -- from the musical understanding of the performer himself. There is no text that can impart more than the rudiments of it, and no theory that can make an insensitive performer into a sensitive one, or deprive a great performance of its greatness merely because it didn't follow some dry academic precepts.
Those precepts can be useful, even valuable; one can't hear a Bach cantata with the original instruments without understanding that these are the sounds he had in mind. Sometimes, they're necessary: it just isn't possible to play the Moonlight sonata on a modern instrument and achieve the remarkable effect Beethoven achieved.
But when those precepts are poorly understood and conflict with musicality, I say out the window with them! And I have no doubt that Bach, who was not beyond arranging a concerto movement for chorus and is said to have had little patience for dry theory but to have taught instead by example, would agree.
ds
as you grew up. Get over it.
I've been singing and listening to Bach for over 50 years, and Jochum's Bach bores me.
NB It's STILL Bach, so I wouldn't turn it off it was on FM, but I've grown past it. You haven't, it seems.
The Bach I now know is richer, more complex, more rhythmic, more intense and more alive than the old 'golden era' recordings.
I sing in a choir led by a Bach specialist and it is hard work, but the music is alive in ways I now realise were all but buried by that tradition.
I prefer my Bach without the pantaloons on its 'naughty / lively' furniture legs as introduced by the Victorians.
Pleasing the new 'mass middle class audience' was not a good thing for serious art, IMO.
Hardy and Dickens had to politically adjust the bit and point of their work for the periodicals, not merely bowdlerise 'the naughty bits'. These works remained powerful because of their bite - but the research that reveals the original intent to be far more powerful and richly detailed - is also vital.
It is plain to me that serious music and performance practice followed suit.
Why should music and its performance be sequestered from this kind of research?
Lastly, you and Josh and other HIP-haters here are merely pissing into the wind.
That I can dig HIP despite being of the same generation as the nay-sayers is proof of that.
Note that a post in response is preferred.
Warmest
Timothy Bailey
The Skyptical Mensurer and Audio Scrounger
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach - Chaucer. ;-)!
'Still not saluting.'
NO sane person would say it's boring.
Hyperbole is fun, but in such a setting, silly.
Timbo - you're in your element and having a field day! ;-)
I'm not an admirer of Klemperer or Jochum either (at least in this repertoire), but, IMHO, HIP mannerisms throw out the baby with the bath water! How 'bout some happy medium:
Notice the painting on the cover - the saint is on his knees, so he can't dance and gyrate around like he's in some HIP performance! ;-)
Of course, when I want the most in profundity and monumentality, or, gosh darn it, just plain old S-L-O-W tempos, I go for Giulini or Celibidache!
You can tell from their expressions that they're not going to put up with HIP!
He said Bach is his favorite composer, though. So I find it hard to believe it won't click, given a chance.
I don't know the Jochum recording, but you should try Minkowski:
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