What’s There to Do in a Eugene July? Oregon Bach Festival – Eugene, Oregon, USA
What’s There to Do in a Eugene July?
Eugene, Oregon Travel Guide
Mass in B Minor
If you’re religious, then what I’m about to say might offend you. If you are a music student, aficionado or snob, what I’m about to say might offend you. So you’re warned, but here it: J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor is a head-bopper whang-dang of a helluva piece of music.
I attended a performance of the MIBM, the opening concert for the 2002 Oregon Bach Festival, having frankly no blooming idea what to expect. Luckily my companion and I attended a workshop/talk on the MIBM beforehand (the OBF has many such sessions before major concerts, which really help both layman and aficionado better understand the music they will soon hear). Snippets of segments of the MIBM were played; the effect on me, and apparently on the rest of the attendees, was akin to walking past a pub, a man coming outside with a bottle in one hand and a pint glass in the other; he then approaches you, proceeds to pour the best-smelling, nicest-coloured beer you have encountered otherwise only in the heavenly brewery of your hoppingest dreams.
Then he turns around and walks back into the pub.
What else are you going to do, but follow, and snag a glass of your own of that brew?
When I walked into the concert hall that Friday night, it was with a similar sense of anticipation. The Mass in B Minor is one of Bach’s most enduring and influential works – and saying that about Bach isn’t exactly easy. This wasn’t a one-off sort of composer, no one-hit wonder that had the choirs singing from Kiev to Kent but then never heard from him again. Bach authored at over 1,000 pieces of music, from various masses to his famed Brandenburg Concertos, to his fugues, such the well-known Toccata and Fugue in D Minor – the perfect song to scare kids by on Halloween, the piece of music Captain Nemo plays in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
From the same pen and from the same mind came the MIBM. Yes, it’s a piece for worship; its reason for being was religious and spiritual; its composer was, after all, a devout Lutheran in 18th-century Germany. But you don’t have to be a Christian, don’t have to be anything remotely religious, neither Wiccan nor Wesleyan, to appreciate this music. Much like walking backpack-laden down the high street of a new vast crowded city, the MIBM requires nothing more than a spirit of adventure on your part.
I won’t try to relay details, or particulars of verse, or score, or of solos vocal or instrumental. I do not possess the technical vocabulary of music to explain what I could hear, and even if I did, the music is more than my words can bear. It takes speakers, not HTML, to properly render the power of full orchestra, 4 vocal soloists (tenor Christopher Cock, bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, soprano Karina Gauvin, and alto Ingeborg Danz) and a double choir (yup, 2 choirs, one performance – it’s a lot of singers, mate, and they could bring the house down if they wanted). I just can’t bring it across. I might as well, as the old saying goes, try to dance about architecture. Bach as composer, and Helmuth Rilling as conductor and artistic director of the OBF, and all the players and singers, let the music speak for itself.
I can say that to listen to this music, to really focus on the music and the performance and nothing else, is to reach out for a moment and with your fingers to move back a veil over things you once thought were obscure. It is to turn your soul inside-out to a shower of warm water, and to turn it back in clean, fresh. It is to breathe deep beauty and power that we humans can probably only ever barely begin to understand or to appreciate.
Forgive me for going on at such length, and in such passionate terms. I recently heard a bit of amazement in a concert hall, and I have not quite been the same since.
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