John Eliot Gardiner

To celebrate JEG's 80th birthday (which he marked on Radio 3 last Monday with a somewhat lugubrious performance of the B Minor Mass)I thought I would give this book another chance. To say it had glowing reviews when it came out would be an understatement. At the time I thought it overlong and more importantly it seemed to me that Gardiner couldn't decide if he was writing something for academics, choral conductors or the general reader and as a result there are real lurches and much incongrous tone and content.
I've come to the conclusion most critics maybe didn't read, well let's say quite of all it. You can imagine their thoughts as the book thudded through the door - 'it's by John Eliot Gardiner, it's really long and it's about Bach. It has to be a masterpiece and if I am really quick I can be the first one to use the word “magisterial”’. Well it's not a masterpiece, but there are obviously some insights. Maybe more editing could have helped but one suspects (just a feeling obviously given his relaxed and democratic approach to rehearsing) that JEG was probably not sympathetic to being rewritten. Oh well. There probably aren't many Dorest farmers who have written a book on Bach who are also conducting at the Coronation.… (mais)

Johann Sebastian Bach is regarded as one of the most enigmatic composers in music history. How could such beautiful work be produced by a man who appears so ordinary, so obscure - and oftentimes so intemperate (when we can distinguish his personality at all)?
Every morning and evening, John Eliot Gardiner passed one of the only two original paintings of Bach on the stairs of his parents' house, where it hung for safety during WWII. Since then, he has been studying and interpreting Bach, and is currently considered one of the composer's best living interpreters. This amazing book distills the fruits of a lifetime of immersion, founded in the most recent Bach study but pushing far beyond it. The breadth and depth of music analysis is astounding and sometimes difficult to decipher, but worthy of the genius on whom the book focuses.… (mais)

Four months to read this book! Some brilliant things here, but also very frustrating. Gardiner strongly believes that Bach's religious music, specifically the prodigious cantata cycles, the St. John and St. Matthew Passions, and the B minor Mass, are at the absolute center of Bach's accomplishment and identity. Fine, but he neglects Bach's stupendous "abstract" music, and really fails to address how those not attached to Bach's Lutheran variant of Christianity - how those who may not be religious at all - may find Bach's work to be the most important musical accomplishment of the last millennium.

This is not a standard biography; again that is fine, but if you want to know the basic data of Bach's life, this is not the place to start. (In spite of the book's 560 pages of text, Gardiner really does not touch upon J.S. Bach's family life at home, which is a little peculiar for a man whose wives went through twenty full-term pregnancies.)

Gardiner is an important and extremely accomplished musician, and it is very valuable to read this appreciation of the great composer written by someone who approaches him from that angle, from someone who understands how Bach's genius is expressed through performance. Just be aware that this should not be the first, and definitely not the last, book about Bach that you read.… (mais)