Kate Chisholm

Bach breaking

Plus: why are so many podcasts American? Is it because of the stranglehold that Radio 4 has on the British market?

issue 14 November 2015

It’s just not what you expect to hear on Radio 3 but I happened upon Music Matters on Saturday morning and after playing us a clip from the opening chorus of St Matthew Passion Tom Service pronounced, ‘Bach is a tasteless and chaotic composer.’ I felt as if my ears had been syringed.

Service was actually repeating what one of his guests, the Bach scholar John Butt, had just asserted, as if to verify his intention. Was he really saying that the composer formerly thought of as the epitome of balanced reflection and ‘motivic organisation’ would have sounded ‘incompetent’ to his audiences in 1727? Butt insisted, on the Passion, ‘It’s a complete mess.’

As I thought back on the music we had just heard, and with Butt’s comments in mind, Bach’s choruses did sound disorganised, the singers singing across and against each other, the styles mixed up from pastoral to fugue and back again.

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