Mein Gott, Vorsprung durch Technik

This was the name of an imaginary cantata in Private Eye‘s version of the Radio 3 listings during the Bach Christmas, in which only J.S. Bach was broadcast on Radio 3 for ten days.

When there was a similar exercise for Beethoven, we thought that doing the same for Bach would make the listener feel as if they were spending the week in church. It did feel like that sometimes, especially at a time of year when I’m singing in church a lot anyway. When I turned the radio off I could still hear in my head a choir bursting out into a vigorous four-square chorale harmonisation, or a soloist delivering some recitative before launching into an aria interwined with an instrumental obbligato. But the balance between sacred and secular was maintained and those 24 hours of organ music were well spaced out (I think a lot of it was in the middle of the night). I did get to hear my favourite chorale prelude, BWV 721, tucked in among longer pieces.

The programmers had an inclusive attitude to dubia, and these provided some entertainment as we tried to work out why they might not be by J.S. Bach, or in some cases how anyone could have thought that they were. With Beethoven there were some pieces where his inspiration clearly flagged, but it would have been hard to find much of that among Bach’s works.

This time the piece that kept coming round was the famous Chaconne from one of the violin partitas. I heard several versions, though I must have missed the arrangement for piano by Busoni as I can’t imagine they didn’t play it.

Some final impressions:
– I am fairly familiar with Bach’s instrumental music and the major choral works, but much less so with the cantatas. I’ve probably sung in performances about ten of them. (But then I’ve not sung in the B minor Mass as a soprano, a proper performance of the St Matthew Passion, or the Christmas Oratorio either).
– the Moog synthesiser now has the status of a historical instrument
– (purists stop reading) other things being equal, I prefer Bach on the piano to the harpsichord!

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2 Responses to Mein Gott, Vorsprung durch Technik

  1. Green_Monkey23 says:

    Sorry for your time…. Why i can’t see images on this resource?
    My Browser is: Opera.
    Thank you.

  2. vhk says:

    A reasonable question. The answer is that no-one (myself included) has attempted to post any until now. But I’ve put one in here.

    I should add that I review all comments carefully before making them viewable. Images which are inappropriate, slow to download or excessively large won’t get through.

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