Bach Means Brook Poem by gershon hepner

Bach Means Brook



Bach means brook, which turns into a stream
of consciousness that flows
into the oceans of the mind, whose dream
its measures recompose
each time his moving music is performed,
a pure polyphony
that leaves the listeners in a tide transformed
by Bach’s epiphany.

Benjamin Ivry writes about Bach’s Six Suitesd for Unaccompanied Cello in the WSJ (“A ‘Testament to Bach’: Paul Tortelier broke Pablo Casals’s lock on the Cello Suites, by Benjamin Ivry, ” December 6,2008) :
We don't know exactly when, why, or for which soloist Bach composed them, though they were likely written around or before 1720, when he was employed by the Saxon patron Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Köthen. Each of the Cello Suites contains six movements, starting with a Prelude, followed by a series of alternating movements adopting the titles of slow or brisker courtly dances, such as Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Minuet, Bourrée, Gavotte or Gigue. Since no autograph score in Bach's own hand survives, the Suites were preserved in copies by others. They were long seen as dry exercises, until around 1890, when Pablo Casals (1876-1973) , a young Catalan musician, happened upon them in a Barcelona music shop and took them to heart. Casals practiced the Suites for a dozen years before playing them in public, and he waited until he was 60 before he began to record them, with granitic, Old Testament-style sternness, veracity and authority; transfers of his late 1930s recordings are still available from diverse CD labels like EMI, Naxos, Opus Kura and Pearl…
Fortunately, a newly available historical document neatly sweeps away all the other pretenders to the throne of Casals. 'Paul Tortelier: Testament to Bach - The Complete Cello Suites, ' a new DVD from VAI (vaimusic.com) , features performances by the French cellist Paul Tortelier (1914-1990) . A longtime colleague and worshiper of Casals, Tortelier was filmed in July 1990, playing the Suites in the 10th-century Catalan Benedictine abbey of St. Michel de Cuxa, Prades, the site of a Casals music festival. That year marked the 40th anniversary of the first local Casals Festival. When Tortelier was preparing for those concerts, he found time to grant me a phone interview from his home in Nice. I recall his vibrantly excitable high-tenor voice (at first I thought I was speaking to his wife) expressing the kind of exuberance that made Tortelier rightly beloved as an endearingly eccentric personality as well as a superb musician. Lean and crane-like, he looked like Sherlock Holmes when young and Don Quixote as he aged. When, during our 1990 phone conversation, I praised his 1961 and 1983 recordings of the Bach Suites (the 1961 version from EMI, still unsurpassed, is sadly unavailable on CD) , Tortelier replied: 'I am modest, basically. I have too much consideration, admiration, veneration for the divinity of Johann Sebastian Bach to consider myself as anything but an ant next to a god.' On the DVD from VAI, filmed in the stark, severe abbey chapel, Tortelier plays the Suites with decisive fervor, while incorporating the grace and elegance of the French school of cellists. On an equally fascinating 2006 DVD from EMI's Classic Archive series, Tortelier leads a 1960s master class in Bach's First Suite. He informs them: 'Bach in German means brook - this brook runs to the river and that river runs to the sea. It's a progression which begins delicately and poetically. If you add too much expression with excessive Romanticism, the water stops flowing.... If you want to do an abstract Bach... then the water turns cold. That's no longer a Bach who glorifies God and nature, but one who glorifies the metronome.' The abstract, yet deeply humane essence of these works is revealed when Tortelier explains how the Suites' fleeting moods are like 'detours which occur when water takes a certain direction, carrying us along, yet these moods pass like reflections in the water, lightly, not weighted down. We already sense the flux and reflux of the sea, which we are approaching.'

12/9/08

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