Bach's Mass in B Minor

I was priviledged to go along with Kent Reed to a performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor in Berkeley yesterday evening. Kent is the timpanist with the American Bach Soloists, performers of baroque and early classical music using period instruments... the instruments (or copies thereof) that were played at the time the music was composed.

Bach's B Minor Mass is a compilation of elements penned earlier in the composer's career. Surprisingly, there is no record of the piece having been performed in its entirety in Bach's lifetime, though his son, C.P.E. Bach, conducted a perfomance of it in 1786. The piece was virtually forgotten until the mid-1800's, around a century after the composer's death.

Kent told me if you were to make a list of the greatest choral pieces every composed, this would rank right up at the very top. And from what I heard last night, he's right. I'm no expert... far from it... but from the opening strains, I was transfixed.

I think it's amazing that something we now consider so transcendent in its beauty was essentially passed over by the generation that first heard it.

On a separate but related note, I was so very impressed by the performers... my friend, Kent, included... who devote themselves to giving the rest of us a glimpse of what it must have been like to have heard this music performed in its day. Kent's timpani, for example, are English-made and from about 1840. They are tuned by hand knobs, not by pedals like modern timpani. The trumpets and french horns of the period have no valves at all; the musicians play the scales using only lip control. The oldest instrument was an upright bass from the late 1600's... over three centuries old!

If you ever get the chance to hear period instruments, do it. And if you can ever hear Bach's B Minor Mass, that's a must-do as well.