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Brandenburgs
Week One
The first week of Bach at Home 2020 explores Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Cello Suites with performances, interviews, videos, and content featuring Principal Conductor Bernard Labadie, cellist Pieter Wispelwey, the musicians of Orchestra of St. Luke’s, with Michael Trusnovec and the Paul Taylor Dance Company! In Bernard’s Bach, Labadie illuminates lesser- and well-known pieces by J.S. Bach.
On the Viola Da Gamba and Arranging Bach
Here we have an arrangement of one of Bach’s most famous compositions for the organ, the Passacaglia (or Passacaglia and Fugue) in C minor BWV 582. Though Bach was a fluent performer of violin, viola, and many keyboard instruments, his primary instrument was the organ, and his reputation during his lifetime was based mostly on […]
On Musical Memory and Isabelle Faust
Everyone has a memory of a specific piece of music that meant something at a crucial moment in their life. We ask each other questions like “Where were you when 9-11 happened?” With me, this question tends to be: “What music did you listen to right after it happened?” I don’t remember precisely when I […]
Transformation and Authenticity
With this triple musical dose of Bach, there can’t be too much of a good thing. Our topic is the power of transformation in Bach’s music, and more specifically, his capacity to transform, modify and re-utilize his own music or the music of other composers and turn it into something new and different that takes […]
Welcome to Bach at Home 2020
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Organists: The Ultimate Renaissance Musicians
I love the organ. It’s an instrument like no other. Most musical instruments work in a very simple way: you blow in a tube, you strike a string with a bow or you pluck it with a finger, you hit a piece of wood or metal or some kind of natural or artificial skin with […]
Pieter Wispelwey’s Favorite Bach
Written by Pieter Wispelwey For an experience to be defining there has to be enough time after the event to prove that it indeed has exercised defining influences. The one in my lifetime that I’m thinking of, happened when I was fourteen. So plenty of time and water under the bridge. Others did certainly occur […]
Pieter Wispelwey: JS Bach 6 Suites for Cello Solo (Documentary)
Recorded in 2012 and released as a bonus DVD to the double CD of Bach Cello Suites. Filmed at Oxford’s Wadham and Magdalen Colleges, it features Wispelwey in musical and academic interaction with acclaimed Bach researchers Laurence Dreyfus and John Butt. Courtesy of Evil Penguin Records. […]
Bach: The Fifth Evangelist
This has been one of my favorite Bach pieces since I discovered it in my late teens, an aria about death and total trust in God. This might be funeral music, but of a kind that fills the heart and soul with incredible serenity and comfort. It is anything but sad. You don’t have to […]
Violin Partita No. 2: Giga
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