Alexandra Coghlan

Bingeing on Bach

Plus: at St John’s Smith Square, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment take on a Brandenburg Concerto cycle and, weirdly, leave you wanting more

issue 13 May 2017

Coined in 1944, ‘completism’ is a modern term for a modern-day obsession. What began as a phenomenon of possession — whether of comic books, records or stamps — has evolved in the age of Spotify, Netflix and cloud computing. No activity defines current cultural trends better than binge-watching, completism taken to its logical extreme: art turned extreme sport.

It’s an attitude that has found a natural home in the concert hall and opera house (what is Wagner’s Ring Cycle, after all, if not the original box set?) where length has long been fetishised and endurance accepted. But just as new media has changed the way we make art, so new contexts have changed how we consume it. Do we listen differently to a performance of a single Brandenburg Concerto compared with a complete set of six? Does Bach’s B minor Violin Partita say something different in isolation than when framed by its five companion pieces?

It takes a brave violinist, and a rare one, to tackle the latter question.

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