Proms: Bach Day
Aug. 14th, 2010 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylI rather enjoyed today's Bach concerts, which ranged from the purity of the English Baroque Soloists Brandenburgs through to the shameless Romanticism of Ottorino Respighi's arrangement of the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor.
The path between the two extremes was smoothed by David Briggs' afternoon organ concert which featured some straight pieces and some extremely inauthentic arrangements — Virgil Fox's take on Komm, Süsse Tod may have been beautifully played, but that didn't stop it being six steps beyond schmaltzy. Briggs' own arrangement of the 3rd orchestral suite worked extremely well and showed off the Albert Hall organ to great advantage, even if it did sound a bit like a crazy carousel in the final gigue.
The highlights of the orchestral arrangements were the two new pieces, Tariq O'Regan's deliciously ethereal Latent Manifest and Alissa Firsova's chirpy Bach Allegro. The rest of the arrangements, with the exception of the Granger and Respighi, were generally a slightly creaky set of warhorses by English conductors.
While I agree that it might be nice to give some of these pieces an outing every now and again, it seems something of a mistake to programme them all together in a single concert. And it seems a mistake to schedule a concert of Bach arrangements without including Arnold Schoenberg's take on the St Anne Prelude and Fugue — surely the best orchestral version of the best Bach's preludes and fugues...
The path between the two extremes was smoothed by David Briggs' afternoon organ concert which featured some straight pieces and some extremely inauthentic arrangements — Virgil Fox's take on Komm, Süsse Tod may have been beautifully played, but that didn't stop it being six steps beyond schmaltzy. Briggs' own arrangement of the 3rd orchestral suite worked extremely well and showed off the Albert Hall organ to great advantage, even if it did sound a bit like a crazy carousel in the final gigue.
The highlights of the orchestral arrangements were the two new pieces, Tariq O'Regan's deliciously ethereal Latent Manifest and Alissa Firsova's chirpy Bach Allegro. The rest of the arrangements, with the exception of the Granger and Respighi, were generally a slightly creaky set of warhorses by English conductors.
While I agree that it might be nice to give some of these pieces an outing every now and again, it seems something of a mistake to programme them all together in a single concert. And it seems a mistake to schedule a concert of Bach arrangements without including Arnold Schoenberg's take on the St Anne Prelude and Fugue — surely the best orchestral version of the best Bach's preludes and fugues...
