April Blog

Bach’s Birthday! Encore Blog Post

It’s been a month since J.S. Bach’s birthday on March 21^st. Think about this: what if you could write a musical composition that would still powerfully move listeners 300 years after you had written it? This thought totally overwhelms me.

Friends know that I love the songs written by The Beatles. They still move me sixty years after they were written. But I wonder, should the human race be here 300 hundred years from now, would listeners still be moved by “With a Little Help from My Friends” or “Eleanor Rigby”? Perhaps. But we know that people are still moved by the music of Bach.

Johann Sebastian Bach holds a special place in me, undoubtedly owing to the four years I spent as a choirboy at St. Peter’s Choir School in Philadelphia. We sang a lot of Bach there. And when I won the annual piano prize in my fourth year at the choir school, I was given an LP vinyl recording of Glenn Gould playing the Bach D Minor Keyboard Concerto on the piano. I still have this LP. I cherish it like a sacred relic even though, as a twelve-year-old, I wore it out from so many repeated plays on my old Gimbel Brothers monaural record player.

The orchestra, a group of New York freelancers much like the members of The Discovery Orchestra, is identified as the Columbia Symphony Orchestra—as in the Columbia Record Company. Oh my, I’m dating myself! Like the RCA Symphony Orchestra, freelance orchestras associated with the former “major labels” no longer exist. The conductor on this recording is a young Leonard Bernstein.

Glenn Gould’s playing is beyond exquisite—like fine crystal. The strings are playing with pre-current-day-Baroque performance practice … that is, with fervor and vibrato. But if that does not bother you, here is the YouTube performance of the third movement of Bach’s D Minor Keyboard Concerto. There are also wonderful photos of Maestro Bernstein and Mr. Gould.

And if you are so moved—or perhaps I should say … if you are in need of being moved today, of being connected with the infinite—take ten minutes and join the more than half a million listeners who have listened to and watched Glenn Gould play Bach’s Goldberg Variations 26 – 30 & Aria da Capo. As they used to say at the end of a commercial in the 1950’s: “You’ll be glad you did.”