Reissued Reissues
A small box arrived from The Musical Heritage Society, containing two CD albums of Bach, and I'm finding this extremely quaint. Extremely. My membership in the MHS can be divided between three distinct periods: three years of high school, about four years ca 1988, and since 2000. At all times, of course the MHS has been a redistributor of other labels' recordings; the difference between now and the 1960s is that now it reissues recordings that have already been released here on major labels. In the 1960s, it was the American (North American?) licensee for minor European labels.
Yesterday's arrivals add another layer. Both albums were recorded in Vienna by an undisclosed label and released in the United States on the Bach Guild label, which, while not quite premium in those days, was certainly not a budget line, either. The Bach Guild was targeted to the growing body of listeners, largely professional people I expect, who found in Bach an intellectual tonic and who preferred a lean, "original instruments" sound, preferably performed by a small chamber orchestra, to the lush arrangements by Leopold Stokowski and others that one encountered in the concert hall. There weren't many professional chamber orchestras in the United States in those days; there were plenty of academic and amateur groups, but they didn't travel. I remember the New York Pro Musica coming to Notre Dame - and I remember how exceptional that sort of thing was. Chamber orchestras would begin to appear in the Seventies. By then, the repertoire - Vivaldi through, say, KPhE Bach - had been made more or less familiar by imported recordings. The notable performances appeared on labels such as The Bach Guild, while people you never heard of played on LPs released to MHS subscribers. Now, today, 24 January 2006, I have on my desk two albums that, having been redistributed decades ago by the Bach Guild, have been reissued by the MHS.
Bach is the only composer to whose music I can listen when I work - if I can listen to anything at all. I can guess why this is so, but my surmises probably wouldn't make much sense to anyone who hadn't experienced the same thing. Almost everything that I can think of makes Bach sound trivial and very limited. In fact, Bach limits himself. Every piece - and it's worth noting that very few approach ten minutes in length, much less surpass it - sets a very specific goal, such as working out the possibilities of casting a given musical fragment in a certain canonical structure. (If you don't know what that means, just think "puzzle.") And that's that. There are no distractions and few surprises. Bach writes with a beautiful craftsmanship that accords with and soothes the working brain.
If Mozart makes you smarter (temporarily, by making paying attention more interesting than it usually is), Bach actually makes you think.
The reissues in question are: Gustav Leonhardt's 1953 recording of the Goldberg Variations and a complete set of the keyboard concerti (single and multiple), played by I Solisti di Zagreb under (who else?) Antonio Janigro. Anton and Erna Heiller, Kurt Rapf and Christa Landon are the soloists. I haven't listened to the Leonhardt yet, but the concerti are clear and lively.
