March 21, 2009 - 324th Birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach

BBC (Wikipedia) ^ | n/a | n/a

[Borges]

The Mozart Piano concertoes are the best music for soloist and orchestra ever written by anyone. Carmina Burana? Ugh! That’s up there with the Pachelbel Canon in the ‘Enduring Schlock’ category. Ever listen to late Debussy like the Etudes? He went way beyond ‘Claire De Lune’.

[Desdemona]

Bach was a conceptual old fogey.

I'll be honest, Vivaldi is not exactly my favorite, but when it comes to performance, he's a lot easier to interpret.

[Desdemona]

The Taco Bell canon,oops Pachelbel, is an insult to strings players everywhere and is really a funeral piece, but people forget that. Carmina is actually a lot of fun with the right conductor. Last season, the final performance of Carmina is one of my "scrapbook" performances, it was that good - and it sells out every time we do it.

Late Debussy - not in a while. For Etudes, I usually listen to Chopin, but then only if I'm moody.

Gotta go. We're singing a Palestrina piece at Mass this morning I should probably go over it.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

If Bach was so great why wasn't he on TV?

I know, it's Beethoven.

[Borges]

Film score nights sell out too. :-) CB is a shallow Stravinsky rip off.

[BroJoeK]

"If, as a devout Catholic, I can get over that Mozart went freemason and ridiculed the Church on a regular basis...seriously, you don't know what you're missing. le Nozze di Figaro is every opera singer's favorite. The piano concertos are fabulous background music. The Requiem is a lot of fun to sing, but I wouldn't do it in church."

Well, I'm delighted to learn Mozart was a Freemason, and at the same time as our own Founding Fathers such as Washington, Franklin, about 1/3 of the signers of the US Constitution and nearly half of Washington's generals.

Freemason at the time generally meant unitarian, deist, Jew-friendly, certainly "anti-papist," but also highly supportive of all free expressions of religion. Remember, Benjamin Franklin -- likely the most irreligious of our Founders, but also gave money to support building every new church in Philadelphia, including a synagogue. That's what "Freemason" means to Americans.

So to me, Mozart's freemasonry puts him in a different light. I might even overlook the gosh-awful laugh that movie gave him...

Still, the real issue here is doo-wop. I love doo-wop, am pretty sure angels in heaven sing doo-wap acapella, along with barbershop and maybe a little Bach, occasional Beethoven Odes to Joy! ;-)

But his freemasonry notwithstanding, they reserve most of Mozart for cases where waterboarding is no longer allowed. ;-) Also, those 72 virgins (or is it raisins?), they all laugh like Wolfie in the movie. ;-0 !

[BroJoeK]

"pretty sure angels in heaven sing doo-wap acapella"

Forgot to mention Alison Krauss, surely an angel from heaven sent to teach us how to do it!

[Desdemona]

Film score nights sell out too.

Depends on the film score. We were one of the cities on the Lord of the Rings tour and those performances sold out so fast, they opened a rehearsal to the general public. I would imagine an evening of John Williams might sell out and then you'd have the whole orchestra and chorus going, "That's from Belshazzar's Feast" "That's from Swan lake" "That's from Dvorak", etc. Captain Blood, OTOH, did not sell out.

[Desdemona]

Mozart was a heretic and was far more interested in being fashionable than anything else. Despite that, he was still an unparalleled genius. Two bar phrases, no wild vocal jumps, matched the music to the text - he was the best at it.

[BroJoeK]

"Mozart was a heretic and was far more interested in being fashionable than anything else."

If I remember right, Jesus was also a heretic, so I wouldn't hold that against Mozart. But the movie Amadeus portrayed him as, basically, a frivolous suck-up to European royalty. It did not mention anything as serious as freemasonry, or explain how he became interested in it. And my view of Mozart is pretty much based on that movie. Maybe I'm wrong...

Anyway, I love most of Bach, Beethoven and some of the other classical masters. Never could get into Mozart. You know, some people like Elvis but not the Beatles. Who can explain these things?

[SunkenCiv]

;’) Somewhere I have a VHS episode of “Cosmos” — unopened I think — given to me by friends. It’s the one about UFOs and such.

[Cincinna]

Thanks, Civ.

Anything JS Bach is a treat for me!

[SunkenCiv]

My pleasure. Hope I actually pinged ya...

[CzarNicky]

1936

you mean the Berlin games not the Munich games.

[Fred Nerks]

thank you for the correction, yes it was Berlin, not Munich...but why didn’t you just point that out to me in your previous comment, instead of trying to make it appear as if I thought hitler was around in 1972?

wanna medal?

[dfwgator]

"Ahhh, Bach!"

[Borges]

Heretic? He talked about the Afterlife in his letters. He reffered to Voltaire as ‘that Godless Arch-scoundrel’.

[CzarNicky]

because it sounded funny