Richard Egarr
Conductor
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| Richard Egarr biography |
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| Richard Egarr discography |
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| Richard Egarr press kit |
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| Richard Egarr press quotes |
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| Richard Egarr sample conducting programmes |
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| Richard Egarr sample harpsichord recital programmes |
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| Richard Egarr short biography |
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Photos |
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Richard Egarr (credit: Marco Borggreve) |
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Richard Egarr (credit: Marco Borggreve) |
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Richard Egarr (credit: Marco Borggreve) |
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Richard Egarr (credit: Marco Borggreve) |
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Richard Egarr (credit: Marco Borggreve) |
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Richard Egarr (credit: Marco Borggreve) |
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Richard Egarr (credit: Marco Borggreve) |
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Richard Egarr (credit: Marco Borggreve) |
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Richard Egarr (credit: Marco Borggreve) |
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Reassessing Bach’s CV
Richard Egarr explains Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos had to emerge from obscurity.
Michael Tumelty, Glasgow Herald
20 October 2010
An enterprise that is unprecedented in Glasgow, certainly in recent times, will be staged in the Merchant City on Saturday. During the course of a long day and evening, with a stream of events in the City Hall and its Recital Room, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach will go under the microscope.
The day will bring to the city centre some of the world’s greatest authorities on the music of Bach, including Professor John Butt, whose thoughts and writings have brought a unique human dimension to the world of Bach and his music. He will be joined by Richard Egarr, the amazing harpsichordist, raconteur, anecdotalist, entertainer, and unstoppable enthusiast on all things musical.
And Egarr himself will give a very special recital that he has devised, an event which will provide a rare glimpse into another human dimension of one of the greatest composers of all time: Bach as a father and provider for his sons, not merely of physical sustenance, but of music and education.
Then, in the evening, at the heart of the first of what Glasgow’s Concert Halls has dubbed its series of Portrait of the Composer days, the City Hall will play host to one of the world’s greatest pioneering period-instrument bands, the Academy of Ancient Music, a small band stuffed with the superstars of the historically-informed style of playing; a band that, for nearly 40 years, through live performance and more than 250 recordings, has consistently breached the walls of ignorance, prejudice and misinformation to establish a benchmark of veracity and authority in getting composers’ music played as it was intended to be played: free of accretions, stripped of varnish, and as straight and true as an arrow.
Click here to watch a film about Richard Egarr and the Academy of Ancient Music.
The academy, with its music director for the past seven years, Egarr, plonked in the middle of the band, directing and playing like a demon, will perform all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.
These six masterpieces, with their irresistible momentum, their infectiously foot-tapping, motoric rhythms, their ceaselessly-inventive counterpoints and orchestrations, and their never-flagging sense of joyful exhilaration, ebullience and effervescence, are among the greatest pieces of music ever written. Collectively, the Brandenburg Concertos are a force of life.
They are also among the best-known, most frequently-played and most heavily-recorded items in the classical repertoire: Egarr tells me that a recent internet trawl he ran on the pieces turned up more than 460 recordings of the Brandenburgs.
However, as universally known as the Brandenburg Concertos undoubtedly are, there is one heck of a narrative in their history. That narrative contains degrees of mystery and contention; exactly what you believe depends on who you talk to. And the musicological wars that have been waged over the background to the Brandenburgs make the old analogy of ferrets in a sack sound more like kittens curled up on a carpet in front of a warm fire.
Why did Bach write them? Who did he write them for? Why were they not performed at the time? Why were they not even published until 100 years after Bach’s death?
We don’t know exactly why he wrote them, though Egarr has a theory, not accepted by some, but perhaps endorsed by Bach’s own words in the dedication on his manuscript.
JS Bach put together the set of six concertos for mixed instrumental groups somewhere around 1720 at the time when he was resident composer at the court in Cothen. In theory, the Brandenburgs might have been written for the apparently fine orchestra at the court. But they were never played by that orchestra. Indeed, believes Egarr, they were neither seen nor intended to have been seen by the orchestra or Bach’s employer in Cothen.
Egarr’s theory is that Bach in fact had his eye on another potential job, with the Margrave of Brandenburg, and these six concertos were intended as his calling card and a request for employment, which Bach comes very close to saying in his dedication on the score: it’s Gizzajob! baroque-style.
Eggar says: “It’s a bit like a young person today going along with their exam results and trying to apply for a job, with references. “Bach put these six pieces together in a presentation copy to the Margrave of Brandenburg in the hope of getting a job. It was a kind of CV, if you like. It’s dated: March 24, 1721. You would have thought that any sane person, receiving a copy of the Brandenburgs, would have given Bach a job immediately.
“But apparently what happened is that the Margrave accepted them, but did not write a thank you letter or send a fee, far less a job offer. What he did was he put them on a library shelf, which is where they stayed, unopened and unplayed, certainly for the rest of the 18th century.
“What is amazing, and utterly bizarre, is that, as far as we know, Bach only ever made that one copy, the presentation copy of the Brandenburgs.”
"It’s absolutely extraordinary that in the middle of the 18th century, people didn’t know these pieces, or perhaps even that they existed."
Richard Egarr
In other words, if Bach, for whatever reason, wrote only a single version of the scores, the presentation copy, and that version was immediately shelved by its dedicatee, then the Brandenburgs, at birth, so to speak, were effectively consigned to oblivion? “It’s absolutely extraordinary that in the middle of the 18th century, people didn’t know these pieces, or perhaps even that they existed. Even in the obituary of JS Bach by the composer’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, himself a significant composer of the period, there is no mention of the Brandenburg Concertos. Yet they are such seminal works.”
So how did they escape obscurity? How did they get out there? Egarr says: “I suspect that one of Bach’s pupils probably got the copy sometime towards the beginning of the 19th century, and I guess it was then circulated among Bach cognoscenti.”
And since when have they been common currency? “Only since the beginning of the 20th century. They were played by the big symphony orchestras, with conductors from Stokowski to Furtwangler performing them.”
But the mass circulation and fast-growing universal awareness of the Brandenburgs really took off only in the era of recordings. The first complete recording of the set was made in 1935 with conductor Adolph Busch.
One authority described this as “one of the most important recordings ever made, as it brought Bach to the attention of a world that had been content to relegate him to the bins of history and academic theory.”
Expect Egarr and the Academy of Ancient Music to be light years beyond the “bins of history”. It will be one player to a part: fat-free Bach, low cholesterol and absolutely no additives; they will play the concertos at baroque pitch, which is almost a complete tone below modern pitch, resulting in a wholly different sonority; and in the famous slow movement of the wonderfully-chuntering third concerto, will play exactly what Bach wrote: one single bar only, containing just two chords. There will be no inserted cadenza, no decoration, no filling out, no ornamentation.
“People fill it out through embarrassment. We will play exactly what Bach wrote. And I’m aiming ultimately to make those two chords last 17 or 18 seconds: that’s how long Furtwangler, one of my great heroes, took over them. I haven’t quite made it yet.”
Elsewhere in this breathtaking and Bach-rich day, acclaimed young cellist Philip Higham will play two of the unaccompanied Cello Suites.
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