Hilliard Ensemble remix plays up Bach’s grief

By Howard Ho
Daily Bruin Reporter

Music is, somehow, supposed to have more power when we feel
sorry for the musicians. Psychologically disturbed David Helfgott
certainly owes his success to having a miserable life in the film
“Shine.” Beethoven is the worst, or best, for just
being deaf. Now Johann Sebastian Bach is getting the
pity-treatment.

The Hilliard Ensemble, along with violinist Christoph Poppen,
performed the musical fruits of such a project Sunday night in
Schoenberg Hall. Though they didn’t necessarily prove the
validity of the pity hypothesis, they gave such wonderful
performances that it didn’t seem to matter.

Unlike most classical musicians who perform pieces, such as a
piano sonata, the Hilliard Ensemble, a classical barber shop
quartet so to speak, sings their albums. They sang their album
“Revelations” for the first half of the concert. This
consisted mainly of interlacing 16th century choral works with
modern composers using ancient texts. The quartet really brings
this often neglected music alive. The ensemble is made up of
soprano Monika Mauch, countertenor David James, tenor Rogers
Covey-Crump and baritone Gordon Jones.

The second half of the show saw the singers perform from their
album “Morimur,” which contains their
“remixing” of Bach. Based on Helga Thoene’s 1994
thesis, the basic idea centers around Bach’s devastation in
learning of his wife’s death during a 1720 trip ““ she
was buried before he had a chance to see her again.

This grief caused him to encode the last movement of his second
solo violin partita, an instrumental piece composed of variations,
written also in 1720, with various inaudible musical references as
a memorial to her. Since a solo violin can really only play a
single melodic line, the other lines hidden within the implied
harmony allowed Bach to express emotions without revealing their
deeply personal content. The modern-day equivalent of this might be
a claim that playing a Britney Spears album backwards would elicit
a message like “Pepsi sucks.” If this sounds too crazy
and oblique, that’s because it is, like reading too much into
a text.

Controversy surrounded this revisionist idea, angering Bach
scholars around the world. The Hilliard even canceled the planned
post-concert discussion, perhaps fearing the worst from a
conservative audience.

The truth may lie somewhere in between, as Bach often encoded
his name ““ musically the notes b flat, a, c, and b natural
““ in his pieces, most famously in his “Art of
Fugue.” Yet if Bach’s “troubled life” can
help sell CDs or aid in introducing Bach’s music to a new
generation, then so be it. Regardless if Thoene’s theory
works, the music remains wonderful and full of power.

The Hilliard Ensemble took turns with Poppen on violin in order
to set up the connection between the partita and various religious
chorales that Bach famously harmonized. The Hilliard proved its
metal with thick, palpable German diction and ethereal tone. While
the music usually takes a choir of 30 or so, the Hilliard’s
mere quartet framed the music as more intimate and compelling, just
as a string quartet has an intimate intensity unlike a large string
orchestra. Poppen flew on his violin, as if Bach’s notes took
him by surprise, giving a fresh, edgy sound.

The only thing lacking from this arrangement was open,
reverberant acoustics, which provided the cathedral grandeur on the
album. Unfortunately, Schoenberg Hall was acoustically dry, with
the music evaporating rather than floating in a mist.

The punchline of the concert ““ the Hilliard singing along
with the Bach solo violin partita ““ lasted about fifteen
minutes and had a sad kind of beauty, even if one thinks Thoene is
a quack. With good performances and good music, it hardly seems to
matter whether Bach wrote the music for his dead wife or for some
money to feed his children. The remixing of Bach may just have been
an excuse to perform his pieces in unorthodox ways, but if so, then
bring on the excuses.