First chapter in fascinating and heartfelt homage to Johann Sebastian Bach by famous British conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner who proposed that his choir and musicians attempt a year-long tour trough churches of Europe and perform/record all the Bach’s cantatas on the appropriate liturgical feast days. Since neither Deutsche Grammophon nor Philips Classics (for whom Gardiner recorded previously) were interested to financially back up the project, conductor formed his own company Soli Deo Gloria and with support of his wife Isabella de Sabata who served as producer, they embarked on carefully planned, gigantic, year-long tour in honor of composers 250 death anniversary. Resulting recordings (there is 20+ of them) were widely praised for artistic vision, performances and historical accuracies, however the sheer volume of this recorded music demands long digestion and carefully dosed listenings.
There was, some years ago, an excellent article in newspapers written by Theodore Dalrymple titled “When Hooligans Bach Down” about little English town of Rotherham where owners of some shops came to conclusion that the best way to prevent robberies by local hooligans who used to gather outside was to continuously play Bach on outside speakers - hooligans eventually did run away from Bach like vampires might have fled in front of holy water, crucifixes and garlic. As everything else he wrote, it was very entertaining and symptomatic about the way our modern times have completely changed in just a few generations. God knows what this music actually meant to people when Bach first composed it and in subsequent centuries it came to represent one of the glories of our civilization, but today we might as well be Martians when it comes to Bach - blame it on education if you will, kids are rarely exposed to this kind of music and they are so ubiquitously conditioned to accept new commercial trends as something truly significant to the point that Bach now ended up serving as anti-hooligan dispenser.
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