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Johann Sebastian Bach |
Bach for cello and organ
25 April and 9 May 2005 - Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, UK
Programme
Johann Sebastian Bach was a master both of musical form and at unlocking the full potential of the range of musical instruments for which he composed. These two Bridgewater Hall concerts, performed by Raphael Wallfisch and the talented young Irish organist Colm Carey, will give the audience the opportunity to experience some of Bach's finest music in the unusual combination of cello and organ.
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The six Suites for Cello together form an acknowledged pinnacle of the repertoire for the instrument, which in Bach's time had hitherto been consigned almost exclusively to a supporting role in compositions. Composed whilst Bach was working in Cöthen (1717-23), each Suite is based on a set of baroque dance forms, preceded by a Prelude where Bach establishes the mood and emotional range of the varied dances to follow. Through the rhythms of the individual dances - Allemandes and Sarabandes, Minuets and Gigues - he brings to the listener by turns a truly remarkable sense of life's manifold joys and sorrows. The opportunity to hear the Suites together across two evenings will allow the audience to appreciate just how wide-ranging is the genius embodied in these wonderful works.
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Bach's many organ works are perhaps more widely known. The two concerts feature some of the most famous pieces from the astonishing range of his compositions for this instrument. Here, although the influence of dance can still be felt, Bach uses other, more ancient musical forms - the Fugue and the Passacaglia - and again finds new heights of expressiveness and drama within these traditional structures. As Colm says: "There are times - such as in the Fugue in Eb - where Bach can't contain himself and is obviously dancing for joy".
To link these two contrasting aspects of the concerts, Raphael and Colm present their own arrangement for cello and organ of the six Schübler Chorales. Bach himself was no stranger to arranging his works for different combinations of instruments as and when the need or fancy arose. Indeed, according to his son, C.P.E. Bach, "If I exclude some of his clavier pieces, he composed everything else without instrument, but later tried it on one." Such was - and still is - the universality of his music that it seems perfectly suited to whatever combination of instruments are employed.
The Schübler Chorales are arrangements for organ made by Bach himself of favourite chorale movements from his extensive set of sacred cantatas, and published not long before Bach's death, by Johann Georg Schübler. So it is fitting that these wonderfully melodic pieces will in these concerts find fresh interpretation in this unusual combination of sonorities, and in the hands of these two masterly performers.