Search

Richter Brandenburg Concertos

Ray
Aug 8, 2016
2 min read

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750)

The Six Brandenburg Concertos

Munich Bach Orchestra

Karl Richter Conductor

Deutsche Grammophon 0440 073 4147 6 GH

ASIN: B000C1XGCG

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehbar90jHz8

Karl Richter had the strangest conducting style (see above YouTube). Very stiff, never cracked a smile, but the results were stupendous. There is a fantastic fervor and enthusiasm to these performances. The beautiful setting in Munich's Schloss Schleißheim enhances the music nicely with its wildly baroque interior decorating scheme. (Schloss means palace in German.)

What a musician Karl Richter was! Not only a great conductor but a virtuoso at the harpsichord and organ, Bach's royal instrument. Appointed at the age of twenty three as Kantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Bach's old position. Richter played the organ at the internment of Bach's remains in the Thomaskirche, where Richter himself had been a pupil. What a pedigree! Richter didn't just study Bach, he lived Bach. He founded the Bach Choir and Orchestra in Munich. While they don't play exclusively Bach, for example recording a wonderful German Requiem, the overwhelming concentration is definitely on Bach.

Still the proof is in the pud and what a proof it is. It is sad to report that at the end of his life, Karl Richter, this unsurpassed interpreter of Bach had been sidelined by the "Historical Instrument Performance" (HIP) craze. You HIPsters think you're so hip, but you are only the latest installment in a musical argument that goes back to Wagner and Mendelssohn. Wagner propounded a conducting method that sought the innermost soul of the music whilst Mendelssohn gave rise to the literal rendering school of conducting, the direct forefather of the HIP craze. Literal rendering is sterile, useless and antithetical to life.

Incredible that Internet critics can say that these interpretations don't smile when they do nothing but. Listen and your mind will be inspired and your soul revived. People will ask you what you're grinning about. This is music, not some desiccated British marginalia.

#Music