Bach as Muse

Image: The School of Athens, Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino 1511

Humans require a few things to live: water, food, and air to breath. What makes one alive, is to breath, and to breath is to make music. Tafelmusik time and again breaths life into the notes on the page and makes the music alive again despite some of it being written circa 300 years ago.

               It is easy, and even borders on cliché, to say breath life into a work, but that is the role of the artist. Creation and animation. At their concert last week “Bach as Muse”, Tafelmusik made music alive and real. Their technical skill is always phenomenal, but their range of control is what makes them great. Under the direction of Ivars Taurins, the choir’s control of dynamics, sound building and softening, crescendo and decrescendo, made the music itself breath. The rise and fall of each phrase made it a created thing, sitting in the chairs next to us as we all sat together.

               The featured choral works, which showcased the influence Bach had on select artists to follow in his craft, were poignant and brilliant examples of the longevity and impact of art. The longevity of human creation and the impact we have on others, is exemplified in Bach. We could clearly hear the influence his style had on countless composers, including Brahms, Mendelssohn, Reger, and Rheinberger. With such a legacy of influence, Bach is no simple task to perform well. Some choruses are nothing to complex as he was often writing for parishioners to sing along, but the polyphony of his grander works is to be left to the pros, and that is where Tafelmusik has time and again executed perfectly.

               From exuberance to meditative sweeping chorales, the tightness and perfect execution the Tafelmusik choral ensemble manages to pull off is exceptional. They become one being, breathing and living the music in unison. Choral singing, or all singing for that matter, is the most (in our opinion) vulnerable thing the human can do. Singing is fragile, music is delicate, one wrong breath and the crystal breaks. But this is not a concern when Tafelmusik comes together to make music. As peak musicians, they understand the task, they understand what bearing the soul for everyone to hear is like, what it sounds like. Perhaps they learned it from Bach, as we heard he taught so many others to do as well.

Not only in group music, where everyone sings together, but the solo cello preludes, played beautifully by Michael Unterman, where what rang through the hall was beautiful music, the breath of the player as the downbow struck, and the education of all present in part of how art and humanity uphold over centuries.