April 23, 2022

Shakespeare.

Last night to the Cathedral to hear the Bach Akademie of Charlotte’s program Florilegium at 400. The Florilegium was (is?) an anthology of motets out of which JS Bach probably choice pieces for the churches of Leipzig when he was unable to provide them himself. Many seem to have been by relatives of his, including Johann Ludwig Bach’s “Gott, sei uns gnadig,” one of the strangest things I’ve ever heard, yet wonderful for all that. I’ve never heard better singing, and the music itself is almost impossible to credit, doing apparently effortlessly what XXth and XXI century music has not managed, a full harmony of the intellectual and the emotional. I’m on the verge of saying, though, that the concert was not a success, for we were talked to death by the director. Fully 1/3 of the time of the program was dedicated to his explanations and elucidations, which I would have welcomed in a Music History class, but which shattered the concert into disparate and un-connectable fragments. I think I remember this flaw from the last time I heard the Akademie. Has no one spoken to him about this? It’s not that what he was saying wasn’t interesting–it was– but it required us to apprehend the works only and exclusively through the lens of his mediation. What if the director came out before each scene of a play to explain what was going on and how the playwright made it happen? Fine in a classroom: at a performance, not. I was actually in a sort of rage about this by the time I left Biltmore, limping on my gouty foot. 

Printed out The Frankenstein Rubrics for the reading this afternoon.