Flying Steps

For the past twenty years, the Flying Steps crew has been at the forefront of breakdancing culture. Respected worldwide and even more so in their native Germany, the entire gang of this award-winning B-boy collective was recently in Bangkok to perform as a part of a Red Bull launch. “It’s our first time here. It’s really special. We’ve been working with Red Bull for thirteen years now. We’re here to represent breakdancing,” said Vartan Bassil, one of Flying Steps’ founders.

The crew’s latest major project, Flying Bach, has been touring the world, selling more than 200,000 tickets so far, and shown at the likes of the Eurovision Song Contest and the Bachfest Leipzig. Flying Bach sees the Flying Steps choreographing and performing breakdance and contemporary dance to Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I (BWV 846-851). “We want to show how artful breakdancing is, and we chose classical music to get the sense of high culture. It’s one of the biggest things we’ve ever done. People have told us that it’s unbelievable how nicely breakdancing works with classical music,” Bassil said.

Bassil, the team’s choreographer, started the Flying Steps in 1993 with Kadir Memis, after he fell in love with Michael Jackson‘s fluid movements, which had him rewinding his VHS tapes over and over to mimic the late King of Pop’s steps. “He was my big inspiration. Back then, there were no hip hop dance classes, so you had to learn everything from the TV by yourself. Then hip hop style came, and I saw a movie about breakdancing. I started to practice every day. Then I decided to become a professional dancer. I told myself it was what I wanted to do with my life,” he said.

Flying Steps was born out of love for breaking and a strong sense of community. The absence of technology might have derailed the growth, but a tight-knit bond was forged since its formation, something that the Flying Steps still strongly retains even with the ongoing success. ”Back in the day, there was no internet. You just had your TV and VHS tapes. So it was important for us to travel in order to see things that kids now can see on YouTube. For us, it was traveling around Europe to be a part of big jams and dance parties, learning new moves. Then you got inspired when you got back home, you started to be more creative with your dancing. Now it’s more than easy, as young people can see everything on the internet, and they can start copying,” said Bassil. ”Sadly, the jam culture is over now. But there are more competitions now.”

”Today, everybody can learn new things very fast, but you need to develop your individual character in your dancing also. There are many good dancers now, but not enough characters,” added Benny Kimoto, a core member of Flying Steps.

To say that the Flying Steps have come a long way would be an understatement. They’re not just your regular breakdancing crew who perform when needed. They run a company which handles a dance academy, show production, talent scouts, workshops and mentorship programs in addition to their repeated wins in the world’s best breaking battles.

Bassil said he’s witnessed how breaking had grown over the span of twenty years, and appreciates how the public is more familiar with breakdancing, which started on the streets, but has now moved into the mainstream dance domain. “It’s now certainly more accepted than it once was. Breakdancing is featured everywhere. Now people understand that what we do is also an art form as well as a sport. It takes a lot of practice, a lot of work and a lot of heart. Breakdancing is definitely here to stay,” said Bassil.

The seasoned dancer’s words ring true especially in the popular music world. Stars of the biggest wattage such as Madonna, Lady Gaga and Rihanna have been using B-boys and B-girls prominently in their shows, a practice that Bassil and Kimoto take in their stride. ”Two of Flying Steps’ dancers were on tour with Madonna. People understand what we do is high level. The big stars will always be interested in working with all kinds of the best dancers, and also as dancers, you’re interested to see the world and how the big stars operate. But in the end, you come back home after the world tour, and you have to find new challenges for yourself. You can’t just stop,” said Bassil.

Besides being part of the lucrative kingdoms of various pop stars, breakdancers have become more visible in reality dance contests where they are always thrown in the mix. ”I don’t feel that it’s really real. They are not really concentrating on the dancing, but more on life stories. There are always background stories in this kind of show,” he said. ”Yeah, it’s more about selling dramas to get more viewers, and most of the time the judges don’t know much about dancing, but they are famous,” said Kimoto. ”In the end, the quality of the dancing is not as high as it should be. People who go on TV shows, sometimes they do it to get fame, they don’t do it from the heart. For me, the best thing for an artist is to get to the high level by your ability, and then people will want to have you on TV. On the other hand, reality dancing contests are a good thing because they make the dance scene bigger and more commercial. But I’d like to see real judges who know about dancing on the shows, and the dancers should be judged on their skills not their stories or how good looking they are. It should always be about dancing.”

As old hands on the breakdancing scene, Bassil and Kimoto have done plenty of judging themselves, and they both agree that they don’t often look for one particularly strong criterion. In their opinion, Asian B-boys are the most technical and have the most discipline, the Americans are more creative and fun, while their European counterparts mix both aspects together. ”There are so many things we look at when we judge competitions. For me, I look for complete, well-rounded dancers, and for musicality, foundations, techniques and creativity among other aspects. You can’t just do the acrobatic stuff,” said Kimoto. ”It’s not so easy to judge, but we’re lucky that we’ve been around for a long time so we have an eye for it,” Bassil said.

Still, for the Flying Steps, breakdancing is not just about competitiveness. As a cardinal rule, Bassil will never encourage anyone under his mentorship to give up dancing, even with limited skills. ”The first thing is that if they have fun dancing, then there’s no need to change them, or tell them to stop. We try to help and support them as much as we can. I think everybody knows his/her limit. We always tell our kids that it’s important to concentrate on school first, and when they finish school, then they can start thinking about becoming professional dancers. It’s a long, long way. You know, there are some talented people, and they don’t want to be professional dancers. You can’t force them to become one,” he said. Bassil and Kimoto insist that the Flying Steps crew is still pushing the boundaries of breakdancing in the hope that their art is perceived with the same prestige as, say, ballet. It’s their life-long mission.

”A lot of people used to ask why I wanted to dance for a living. All I can say to the aspiring dancers out there is believe in yourself and your dreams. Focus on your goal,” said Bassil. ”And work harder than anyone else,” said Kimoto. ”Ten times harder.”

– Bangkok Post

Jazz Sébastien Bach

It’s fifty years since Ward Swingle and a group of Paris-based session singers first experimented with translating Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) into a swing feel. Without changing a note of the original scores, they added jazz scat and a rhythm section to intricate melody lines that had never before been attempted by the human voice. The result was the unmistakeable, era-defining sound of “Swingle Singing.” Their 1963 debut LP took them to number one in the charts, won multiple Grammy awards and redefined what the voice could achieve.

Five decades on, the Swingle Singers are still at the vanguard of vocal music. Successive generations of singers have expanded the repertoire to include jazz, pop, rock and Latin music, via collaborations with artists as diverse as Luciano Berio to Jamie Cullum. The Swingle Singers of 2013 are an a cappella super-group complete with a five-octave range and their own vocal rhythm section. But the group has always kept Bach’s music close to their hearts.

In celebration of their fiftieth anniversary, today’s line-up of seven young and versatile voices will present a special Bach program on 23 May 2013, featuring some of their favorite preludes, fugues, airs and inventions, as part of the ongoing Bach Unwrapped series at Kings Place in London.

– Kings Place

Cascada

Germany is abuzz over accusations that its 2013 Eurovision Song Contest nominee, Cascada, copied the song of 2012′s Swedish winner, Loreen. From a report appearing in Der Spiegel, phonetician Tina John confirmed the plagiarism claims. “Glorious is a copy of Euphoria with subtle stylistic differences,” she said. In terms of beat, vocals and pauses, the songs are very similar. “The vocals at the start are completely identical,” she adds. “The refrain uses the same emphasis and works up to a climax in an identical way. The singer even uses the same breathing style.”

I don’t know the European case law on proving copying, but it seems to me that the motivation of Cascada’s critics here may be less about giving full credit to Loreen’s genius than it is to discredit an entire genre of music. The homeland of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms has always had an uneasy relationship with Europop. Just as rock purists pounced on Nickelback’s “self plagiarism,” the guardians of Teutonic high culture seem eager to banish Cascada from the firmament of musical stars. Despite her Eurovision victory in 2010, I don’t expect Lena to be welcomed to Walhalla any time soon.

The finals of the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest will take place in Malmö, Sweden on 18 May 2013.

Frank Pasquale – madisonian.net

The Keller Quartet

The story of Bach’s pen slipping from his lifeless fingers while composing The Art of Fugue (BWV 1080) – which ends in mid-bar, notes hanging in the air – may be apocryphal, but this work will always be one of music’s sacred mysteries.

It is thought he began it at a time when his overriding interest lay in the technicalities of counterpoint – how to achieve “natural” polyphony while obeying mechanical rules – and that he went back to it when musical dramaturgy was uppermost in his mind. His son Carl Philipp Emanuel tried to drum up interest in it by pointing out that his father had encoded his name in the unfinished final fugue, but the sheet music didn’t sell and he had to dispose of the printer’s plates as scrap metal. Since then the work has exerted ever-increasing fascination – the Nazis flourished it as being iconically German – and Bach’s keyboard scoring has been trumped by scorings for a wide variety of instruments, including saxophones.

If the most successful transpositions have been for string quartet, that’s for two good reasons: these instruments bring out the voices in high relief, and their combined sound can generate the choral effects which Bach was often implicitly striving for. And to hear the Budapest-based Keller Quartet play this work in the perfect acoustic of Kings Place on 1 May 2013 was an unforgettable experience. Any lingering keyboard thoughts were banished in the first few bars by the muscular dissonances and by the sheer glow of their sound, and as each successive fugue added its variation – inverted, back to front, inside out – the structure attained magnificence. The timbre was vibrato-free, the tempi were vivid and varied, and though the sound of Judit Szabó’s cello sometimes stood out as a particular delight, the synergy was ideal. One had the sense, as the four bows finally froze in mid-air, of having assisted at a performance for the gods. Anyone interested can catch this ensemble (with two cast-changes) playing the same work twenty years ago for ECM Records, and with the same poise.

Michael Church – The Independent

The Berlin Cathedral and Television Tower

When Frank Reinecke calls to pick me up, it is, he says, a kind of homecoming. Entirely by accident I am staying in the former East Berlin, around the corner from the Musikgymnasium Carl-Philipp-Emanuel-Bach on Brunnenstraße, where he and his friends all went to school.

Our conversation plunges us back into the heart of a divided Germany, when East Berlin was notorious for its grayness, and the notorious Berlin Wall was within a stone’s throw. A childhood game was to see how many times anyone could run up and down to touch it before the police would come to shoo them away. The nearby former Bernauer Straße U-Bahn station has become the Berlin Wall Memorial, a small section chillingly preserved with watchtower, another area with tunnel paths marked out in slabs on the ground – escape tunnels, and also a Stasi tunnel for secreting spies to the West. Later, as we walk past a building opposite the Bundestag, he tells of editing a recording in its basement and commenting on how remarkably quiet it was – the wall ran just outside the window. Yes, said the sound engineer, except when a rabbit hits a landmine.

I had asked each member of the Vogler Quartet to reveal their favorite cultural haunts, museums, galleries, buildings – or their least-favorite one – and what they missed from the East Berlin they grew up in. That last was the easiest. Nothing, apart from the moments of special camaraderie in a culture that eschewed materialism. They all remember the excitement of their first experience of the lights and smells of the West on the way to a music competition, and their conflict about playing before Erich Honecker in the dying days of the East German state. They sent a letter of protest about conditions in the country, which resulted in a serious security encounter.

I spent most time with Frank Reinecke and the quartet’s leader Tim Vogler, with Reinecke venturing out to the public park that was Tempelhof airport, and cooling down on what had been the hottest day of the year in Peter Eisenman’s controversial Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a forest of tall concrete slabs, like a maze in which you can’t get lost. Vogler heads first to Oderberger Straße in Prenzlauer Berg, where his parents lived before he was born, and where they again live now. It’s a handsome, quiet street, lined with international eateries (his favorite is a Greek restaurant). At the northern end there’s a second-hand shop, VEBorange, specializing in objects from the German Democratic Republic. Its window display has dolls wearing the scarves and uniforms of youth organizations, a lurid orange hand-mixer, toys, lamps and knick-knacks, some of them long enough in the tooth to be back in fashion.

Like Reinecke, who headed south to Leipzig after the breakup of his first marriage, Vogler has also moved, north to Schwerin, but keeps an apartment in Berlin, close to his children and ex-wife. He presents a nature-loving front, pointing out that in Schwerin he has three lakes to choose from for his morning swim.

We pass the celebrated apartment complexes of the Karl-Marx-Allee, an architectural statement of socialist grandeur. What are they like to live in? Pretty good, he says, they even have bidets, and points to some generous penthouse balconies. Time doesn’t permit a visit to the Gärten der Welt (Gardens Of the World) in Marzahn, or that suburb’s notorious vast housing estates from the 1970s and 1980s.The green Vogler has made up his mind about the threats facing the longest surviving stretch of the wall, on the Mühlenstraße in Friedrichshain. He wants it to go. It blocks the view of Berlin’s great waterway, the river Spree, which he finds unforgivable.

Every member of the quartet mentions the city’s Museuminsel (Museum Island). It’s Vogler who takes me there, to the Neues Museum, with its colored bust of Queen Nefertiti, serene and magnetically attractive. He’s not just in awe of the art, but of the building, which was allowed to lie in ruins until its 2009 reopening in a restoration by David Chipperfield, which juxtaposes twenty-first-century modernity and the remnants of Friedrich August Stüler’s mid-nineteenth-century original with moving starkness. Vogler’s bête noire is the pink Alexa Shopping Center at Alexanderplatz.

Berlin’s Konzerthaus, where the Voglers have their own series, is a glorious restoration of the latter days of the German Democratic Republic. The Voglers play in the Kleiner Saal, which looks big from the stage, but, says Tim Vogler, feels small when it is full. It’s not the easiest of halls to play in, he says, the sound being dry enough that players definitely have to work that bit harder at projecting. They all seem to prefer the Konzerthaus to the in-the-round layout of the Philharmonie, home of the Berlin Philharmonic.

Viola-player Stefan Fehlandt takes me to the Hackesche Höfe, a network of arts and crafts courtyards with restaurants, its Jugendstil glazed brickwork glowing in gorgeously saturated colors, and to the Hamburger Bahnhof, a Renaissance-style 1847 railway station that’s been a museum for more than a century. As the Museum der Gegenwart, it’s now visited for Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, and its exterior is lit by a neon installation by Dan Flavin. It’s also where the Voglers took the four-hour-plus plunge into the micro-gestural world of Morton Feldman’s Second String Quartet. They never did manage to have a full run-through in advance, says Fehlandt, and the much-debated topic of loo-breaks was never an issue.

Cellist Stephan Forck is in awe of Berlin’s main railway station, the multi-level Hauptbahnhof, which centralized north/south and east/west connections in 2006, and simplified his life when he had to commute to teach in Stuttgart. It has a kind of efficient modern calm that you never find, say, in the major stations in London.

At the other end of the scale, he loathes the boxy information center on the building site where the demolished East German Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic) is being replaced by a rebuild of the Berliner Stadtschloss, the royal palace that stood there until 1950. It was with Forck, a bishop’s son, that I got to see the cross that – horror of horrors to the East German authorities – the play of light creates on the sphere of the Television Tower they built in 1969. Could this have been mere coincidence?

Michael Dervan – The Irish Times

So our subway etiquette dial is leaning towards POOR on this one. Still, wouldn’t mind hearing this in a park or on the platform.

Jen Carlson – Gothamist

The Bach legacy begins with the students of Bach who, along with members of his own family, were the pupils at the Thomas School and students at the University of Leipzig. From there, the pedigree branches out in many directions. One branch extends from Bach’s son, Wilhelm Friedemann, to the piano student Sarah Levy, great-aunt of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, to Arnold Mendelssohn and the church music reform movement of the twentieth century. Another extends from Johann Ludwig Krebs and his composition pupil Louise Adelgunde Gottsched into the circles of the Leipzig Enlightenment. Last, but not least, Bach’s trail can be traced all of the way to East Westphalia, where his nephew Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst, son of Bückeburg Kapellmeister Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, lived and worked for a time in Minden. There he left behind not only the cantata Westphalens Freude, but also two singing daughters whose ties to the Bach family have been, until now, generally ignored.

New insights into Bach’s musical offspring will be presented in the fourteen lectures of the musicological symposium “Bach: Genius – Genus – Generations” that is taking place in Detmold, Germany on 2 and 3 May 2013. Beyond the life stories of St. Thomas Church choristers, as well as accounts of the University students who studied with Bach in Leipzig, special emphasis will be placed on the contributions that women have made to preserving Bach’s reputation in music history. Alongside Bach’s sons and their compositional work, his daughters and Anna Magdalena Bach will be examined. In addition, the cultivation of Bach in Paris during the French Revolution, in which women played a major role, as well as in the bourgeois musical life of Berlin at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which is illuminated from the perspective of his grandson Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach, will be discussed. With these and other presentations, the event is designed to finally relegate to the realm of legend the story of the forgotten and rediscovered Bach and to introduce a number of interesting personalities and musical works along the way.

– Musikwissenschaftliches Seminar Detmold/Paderborn

Now the whole set has been made available at a remarkably low price as more than three thousand MP3 files on a single memory stick, together with PDFs of essays from the original recordings, though not, as far as I could establish, the texts of the vocal works, even though there would have been plenty of space for them on the memory stick. As a concept alone, it’s pretty astonishing to be able to hold the whole life’s work of one of the greatest composers in the history of western music in the palm of one’s hand – but it would be only that, and the empty triumph of technology over artistic quality, if the results were not worthwhile both musically and technically.

On a musical level, certainly, there can be very few complaints. The core of the whole enterprise was always the pioneering set of the complete sacred cantatas: sixty CDs in the original set, on which Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt worked tirelessly with their ensembles for Das Alte Werk over more than twenty years. While those performances are sometimes a bit more strait-laced expressively than today’s much suaver period-instrument bands, there is a wonderfully uncomplicated directness about the singing and playing that is always fully engaged. Harnoncourt and Ton Koopman share the secular cantatas, while it’s the former’s performances for both the Passions – his outstanding 1970 version of the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244) and a slightly less convincing 1993 one of the St. John Passion (BWV 245), with Kurt Equiluz and Anthony Rolfe Johnson as the respective Evangelists – and for the Mass in B minor (BWV 232), from 1986, that are included.

Koopman also features extensively as an organist; his performances of the complete organ works are spread across sixteen CDs and recorded on a variety of instruments in the 1990s. As you would expect in such a purist set, all the remaining keyboard works are played on the harpsichord, shared between seven different soloists, including Leonhardt in his classic performance of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), Alan Curtis and Bob van Asperen. Leonhardt is the soloist, too, in the harpsichord concertos, while the Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-51) are represented by wonderful buoyant performances from the Milanese group Il Giardino Armonico. Among the instrumental music, Harnoncourt goes back to his beginnings as a string player in the Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12) and the Sonatas for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord (BWV 1027-9), while Thomas Zehetmair plays the solo-violin works.

For this set, the original recordings have been compressed at a bit rate of 320 kbps. That is apparently the maximum quality that can be handled by domestic MP3 players, and the sound seems pretty good, though inevitably can seem restricted when compared with the CD originals. Alternatively the files can be downloaded and then burnt on to CD, though, that rather defeats the object of having them on a memory stick in the first place. Plugged into a computer and played back through high-quality headphones, though, the results are certainly acceptable, even if navigating your way around the 25GB of material is sometimes hit and miss – the search facility provided with the application isn’t terribly sophisticated, and so locating a particular chorale prelude, say, could take a while.

But riffling through 154 CDs to locate a specific track wouldn’t ever be straightforward either, and in the end it is the sheer quantity of music involved that makes the task a challenge. The accessibility and the miraculous compactness of this set are bound to be its huge selling point; as a handy work of reference, certainly, it’s hard to fault.

Andrew Clements – The Guardian

Duo Crezdi

In the final concert of the thirty-second season of the Boulder Bach Festival, Zachary Carrettin, violin, and Rick Erickson, harpsichord and organ, will join forces as Duo Crezdi in an artist recital at First Congregational Church in Boulder, Colorado at 7:30 pm on Friday, 3 May 2013.

The violin sonatas on the program will come from very different places and times. The earliest is Dario Castello’s Sonata Prima in A minor from Libro secundo. Diligent scholarship has not been able to determine any exact dates for Castello’s birth or death. In fact, almost no shreds of biographical evidence exist about the composer. This much is known: Castello lived much of his life in and around Venice. He was an excellent wind player and a master of the bassoon, an instrument which was very popular in Venice at the time. He published two books of sonatas in 1621 and 1629, which were so popular that they were reprinted in the 1640s and 50s. His sonatas are made up of a number of short contrasting sections and the work to be performed by the Duo Crezdi is no exception. As one of the first to write idiomatically for the violin, Castello’s music has a refreshing and delightful spontaneity about it which is easy to hear even four hundred years later.

Biber’s (1644-1704) Passacaglia stands as the last piece in the composer’s ambitious cycle of Rosary Sonatas. For each of the fifteen Sacred Mysteries, Biber composed a violin sonata, but each one is in a different tuning, or scordatura. In the sole surviving copy of the score, every sonata is prefaced by a lovely copper engraving. The Passacaglia is the last piece in the cycle, and the only one for violin without continuo. It is the only sonata that “duplicates” an earlier tuning for the violin – in this case, the ordinary tuning G – D – A – E. The Passacaglia consists of sixty-five repetitions of a descending tetrachord (four-note motive) in which all manner of harmony, melody and expression appears. In the middle of the piece, the descending motive even appears in an upper voice, complicating matters for the interpreter. Claiming the prize as probably the most elaborate composition for solo violin up to that time, Biber’s Passacaglia almost surely had some influence on J. S. Bach when he composed, some decades later, his own magnificent Chaconne in D minor (BWV 1004) for solo violin.

Chronologically speaking, the Bach and Veracini sonatas date from almost the same time. Bach’s six accompanied sonatas for violin and keyboard were composed no later than 1725, and the composer continued to tinker with them for many years thereafter. The Sonata No. 4 in C minor (BWV 1017) is cast very much in the mold of a trio sonata. As Peter Wollny noted, each part (violin, keyboard right hand, keyboard left hand) has its own rhythmic character in the slow movements. For example, in the third movement the violin has a lyrical melody, the right hand of the keyboard has continuous triplets, and the left hand has a bass line mostly in quarter notes. The two fast movements feature dense counterpoint and imitative textures, perfectly in keeping with the idea that each part should be interesting and meaningful in and of itself.

Antonio Veracini (1659-1733) led a colorful life and held important posts in Florence and Dresden. As the story goes, he once claimed that “as there is one God, there is one Veracini.” Without lacking a sense of drama either in life or in music, Veracini once jumped out of a building during an argument in Dresden. He even survived a shipwreck in the English Channel. Veracini’s nephew diplomatically wrote that “the heart, rather than cleverness, guided [Veracini’s] finger and bow.” Of his many published violin works, Veracini’s Sonata in G minor (appearing in 1721 as op. 1, no. 1) is an intense, many-colored piece. Opening with a broad French-style introduction, it quickly moves through an impetuous Allegro before settling into a more lyrical Aria. The anxious Allegro that follows contains several outbursts that might have given even the stoic Bach a severe case of indigestion. The final two movements, a short Minuet and an almost ridiculous Gigue that alludes to the sound of the postman’s bell, do little to dispel the image of an undeniably brilliant, yet slightly unstable, musical mind.

Two works for organ on the concert will feature compositions by men who were close to the Bach circle personally. Johann Ludwig Krebs (1713-1780) studied with Bach in Leipzig. The use of the letters of Bach’s name in the fugue subject reflect an ancient practice, dating back to Josquin, called soggetto cavato (“carved subject”) where the letters of a name determine the musical notes. We therefore have, according to German spelling, a subject of B-flat, A, C, B-natural.

Georg Böhm (1661-1733) was connected to the Bach family from his studies in Ohrdruf, a town which knew several generations of Bachs. Böhm might have tutored the young J. S. Bach but there is no direct evidence to support this assertion. Much later, C. P. E. Bach claimed that his father, J. S., loved to study Böhm’s music. Böhm’s Vater unser im Himmelreich is stylistically much like Buxtehude’s music. It is probably one of the most expressive works he penned. Particularly noteworthy is Böhm’s exploration of the organ’s high coloratura register.

The remaining works by J. S. Bach will show his mastery both of small-scale and large-scale musical forms. The Duetto no. 3 in G Major (BWV 804) is similar in texture to one of Bach’s famous Fifteen Inventions (BWV 772-86), but it is more extended and elaborate. Bach derives an entire motivic menagerie by exploring the possibilities of a simple seven-note cell, heard at the beginning in the right hand. Contrasting with this small scale form, the chorale partita for organ on Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig (BWV 768) is an extended set of variations on a chorale tune. This is the most ornate of the four sets of chorale variations Bach left us and contains eleven variations on the tune. The variations range from simple to elaborate and give us a full spectrum of Bach’s powers of inventiveness.

Paul Miller – Boulder Bach Festival

Introducing the characters, each act of Bach at Leipzig is prefaced by a composer penning a letter that outlines his desire to be organist, each convinced that he is the right man for the job, that his is the righteous path. The missives are then flown by carrier pigeon to the addressees. The six applicants assemble, each bringing a unique talent to the audition, but, more importantly, his political aspirations. Occupation, religion and politics are inextricable in this century, Leipzig a staunch Lutheran stronghold against the advances of Catholicism.

In order to diminish competition, various characters gather for clandestine meetings, making deals that reveal their personal ambitions. In contrast, when the entire group is together, the conversation is laced with double entendres and a facile manipulation of facts, the composers’ apparent bonhomie a façade for negotiations already set in play.

Religious persuasion is critical since the Reformation, beliefs and politics combined to defend the purity of the faith from those who would dilute God’s word in pursuit of personal expediency. In this particular gathering, competing factions proffer a variety of beliefs on predestination, Lutheran traditionalism challenged by the Calvinists‘ “standards” for achieving heaven, while Pietists “embrace an individual spirituality that frees them from all limits,” pure joy divorced from God and available to everyone.

This ingenious play reveals the farcical manipulations and skullduggery behind the scenes of the auditions as musicians resort to bribery and blackmail, religious concerns set aside, in a bid for the coveted position. Based on real persons and events, the humor is pervasive, the contestants revealing their very human flaws and willingness to negotiate in the pursuit of success.

As the play evolves, both politics and religion converge in a drawing-room farce that reaches beyond the secluded world of this appointment. Secret agendas unveiled in a rollicking exchange of broad humor, Bach at Leipzig is a subtle reminder that “politics is only war by other means,” proving once more that nothing is what it seems. The composers are faced with an age-old conundrum, “People . . . have little interest in music or religion. I don’t know what they will call this age . . . its chief characteristic is a profound lack of enlightenment.”

Bach at Leipzig by Itamar Moses will run 3-18 May 2013 at the Dairy Center in Boulder, Colorado in a production by the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company.

Luan Gaines – Curled Up With a Good Book