The towns and cities most associated with J S Bach – Eisenach, Weimar, Cöthen and Leipzig – all stand inside what was the German Democratic Republic, behind what was the Iron Curtain. I had long wanted to visit them as an act of pilgrimage and a chance encounter in Dorset (long story – ask me in the pub) with a citizen of Dresden, also in the East and a secondary Bach city, provided a very useful contact and stimulated Jenny and me to grapple with the necessary paperwork and take the plunge. Continue reading
Happy Birthday, Claudio
1567 – Claudio Monteverdi – 2017
A concert to mark his 450th birthday on (?) May 14th 2017. Monteverdi was baptised on 15th May, 1567. We do not know when he was born but the custom at the time was to baptise within a day or two of birth. His career can be summarised thus:
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Funky Gibbons
I wasn’t originally intending to blog again in the lead-up to Jacobean Secrets but am prompted to do so by three factors:
- Further work on the music we’re singing ahead of the final rehearsal
- Personal preparation for my performance of Gibbons’s Fantazia of foure parts in the first half of the programme
- The broadcast of a quite extra-ordinary arrangement for a modern instrumental chamber ensemble including piano and clarinet of Gibbons’s anthem This is the record of John, which meant little without the words, although it was a pleasant sound. Continue reading
A close encounter
In my 6th form years (late 1960s!) I was invited to join an otherwise adult Madrigal Group that met once a month to sing through secular gems from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Other members of the group included my 6th form tutor and my English teacher but also a man called Alan Kitching, who was the group’s guiding spirit. He was a major figure in the revival of interest in Handel’s operas in this country but it is also thanks to him that I became acquainted with the music of a certain Claudio Monteverdi. Mostly we sang English repertoire, but no session passed without Alan reaching under his chair for a pile of music and ‘suggesting’ that we ‘have a shot at Monteverdi’s Book 5 tonight’. Continue reading
Mind the gap!
Plenty of, perhaps even most, composers have died leaving works unfinished. Schubert immediately springs to mind (8th symphony – even though he went on to write a 9th), but also Bach (Art of Fugue), Mozart (Requiem, C minor mass and multiple instrumental works), Bruckner (9th symphony), Mahler (10th symphony), Elgar (3rd symphony) and so on. Then there are works which are known to have existed but which have been lost: many cantatas and at least one Passion setting by Bach; four completed and three partially completed operas by Monteverdi; perhaps as many as thirty masses by Monteverdi . . . I could go on, but that’s enough depressing thoughts for one day. Continue reading