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I love seeing this on HN! I'm particularly fond of Bach's cello suites but I'm probably biased since I'm a cellist. http://allofbach.com/en/bwv/bwv-1010/
Nice. I still prefer the Partitas for solo violin...
These "allofbach" videos never play correctly on my computer, they play then stop then play then stop. Why so much video quality if it's going to ruin the music experience completely?
When watching videos, you can always press `D` to open the debug panel – that gives you information about your streaming session, and a link to save that data for later.
Let me know if you see something funny there...
I love seeing this on HN! I'm particularly fond of Bach's cello suites but I'm probably biased since I'm a cellist. http://allofbach.com/en/bwv/bwv-1010/
There's a long running joke amongst Altos that you can tell when the composer's wife was an alto, because you get melodic lines. Bach's choral work tends to include as much intricacy as his instrumental work, across all four parts. Bass still tends to get the "walking the root notes of the chords", but not to the same degree as with other composers.
BWV232, Bach's Mass in B Minor is a favourite of mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY1w3EhXqwo
Just before seeing this on HN I was listening to Buxtehude's organ works on my way home. Buxtehude was one of the main inspirations for Bach as a composer¹, and I always find it interesting to go back and forth. But there's a reason Bach is the one that has come to be a superstar - there's the huge number of surviving works, of course, and in many ways how "the student surpassed the master", not least in contrapuncta…
Just to give a striking example of one of Bach's novel fugal techniques:
Bach's St. Matthew Passion starts out with an instrumental fugue with three voices. The first voice does introduces a little fugue subject, then the second voice imitates a fifth above, and finally the third voices enters above that one. Then there's a short episode where the voices trade licks and end on a half cadence. So far a fairly typical beginning for a three-voice fugue.
Then something strange happens-- the baseline moves up a fifth from where it started, and Bach repeats almost everything I just described up a fifth. In other words he takes all three entrances of the fugal subject together, treats them as if they were a single fugal subject, and builds an outer fugue out of that. So we've got a kind of fugue within a fugue. Sure enough, after this second outer entrance finishes the choir enters with the third outer subject. And to the casual listener this all just sounds like a Baroque-era instrumental beginning to a choral piece.
But it's important to point out that the complexity of the counterpoint doesn't truly match the structural complexity. There isn't an additional set of instruments playing the outer fugue-- it's just that Bach organized the music in such a way that we can hear these relationships.
Perhaps relevant: http://www.opengoldbergvariations.org/
But check out the Glenn Gould version, as well.
Also Jacques Loussier has some nice Bach interpretations.
For example, there are two recitals at Stanford's Memorial Church scheduled next month:
• June 5, a recital by Ethan Williams, Stanford student. https://events.stanford.edu/events/673/67311/
• June 16, the annual Commencement Organ recital of Dr. Morgan, Stanford University Organist. https://events.stanford.edu/events/686/68615/
Both events are at 7:30 PM in Memorial Church (https://campus-map.stanford.edu/?id=01-500), and typically end around 9 PM.
You can also keep an eye on https://religiouslife.stanford.edu/programs-events/music and https://events.stanford.edu for future performances (there's already one scheduled for August).