Friday morning with Bach and my tax returns

Happy birthday, Fred!

While it is the birthday of the great Czech nationalist, Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884), I have actually spent most of my morning with J.S. Bach.  Last evening, Barney Sherman, morning host on Iowa Public Radio, promised listeners his "favorite Goldberg's."  As it turned out I got and early warning and found out that we'd all be offered a performance recorded live in Basel in 2001 by Andras Schiff.  It did not surprise me to discover that Schiff is Hungarian-born (yet another great artist from that tiny country!)

Here's a bit of a Schiff performance discovered on YouTube..

Andras Schiff

Honestly I have never listened to the Goldberg's in their entirety.  But, as I took the morning to e-file my tax returns, I used Bach as my background music.  It was, I must admit, extremely difficult paying close attention to my work with such astonishing music (and a superb performance) playing at me on the computer.

The British music critic, Conrad Wilson, has written of the work:

The ear is constantly misled by the fact that, as one astute commentator has observed, the canons tend to sound like variations and the variations like canons.  What hardly any of them ever sounds like is the serene, sweet-toned, gravely dancing sarabande performed at the start, upon whose unhurried strains the entire work is based.  These, it soon becomes apparent, are not variations in the Mozart manner, whereby a them is exquisitely decorated but remains for the most part easily recognisable [sic] What Bach, by a method familiar to jazz-lovers, here prefers to do is to employ the bass notes of the theme as the source of his inspiration rather than the theme itself.  The result, far from being tuneless, is a cornucopian outpouring of melody.

For this reason, people today are perfectly content to sit back and let the music was over them.

Yes, I feel suitable cleansed.

Thank you, Barney.  Thank you, Mr. Schiff.  And thanks especially to Mr. Bach.