Festival Overview
The image of Leipzig hanging over from the 20th century is of a rather dull industrial town in East Germany, with its best days behind it when it was the second city of Saxony – municipal rather than princely. That’s now rubbish. In early summer it is a town full of thriving pavement cafés in a centre that still has its mediaeval and baroque heart as well as all the normal accoutrements of success. The Bach Festival (9 – 19 June) takes place not only in the four churches where he was in charge of the music but in the baroque rooms he and his sons would have known well, the museums to Schumann and Mendelssohn, and on the streets – long into the night. There’s a tram to Halle, the town where Handel was born, and for a week, if you tire of music, you can hop on it to the grass-court tennis tournament so associated with Roger Federer.
Artistic Director: Prof. Dr. Michael Maul
9 -12 June 2022
Multiple musicians and venues
The Review
The joy of the Leipzig Bach festival is the mixture of the intensely serious and the, well, barely serious.
Alongside the performances of high significance in the Tomaskirche, the church where J.S. Bach ruled the music from 1723 (when he was thirty-eight) for a quarter of a century, are more relaxed morning and late night chamber concerts and plenty of free events on the sound state set up in the main square outside the old town hall. In the square, the music is baroque in the afternoons and evenings and rock after ten.
This year the festival ran from 9 – 19 June and I was able to attend the first three days. Even in that short space I listened to five formal concerts and plenty of informal ones. Had I been a real glutton I could have fitted in several more. The festival theme was Bach – We Are Family, a deliberately ambiguous title that brought in not just Johann Sebastian’s many children and relations but the composers who came after and were drawn to his music, particularly Mendelssohn, who spent hugely influential years conducting the city’s Gewandhaus Orchestra.
The orchestra was in evidence at the opening concert, accompanying the Tomaskirche’s choir under the current Kantor, the incumbent in Bach’s post, Andreas Reize. These days he does not have to be organist too. That role is taken by Johannes Lang, who played the organ in the side gallery, which is where Bach’s was sited, rather than the one in the much bigger gallery at the back of the church where the rest of the musicians perform. That poses the problem that, whether the church likes it or not, the congregation is more interested in the music than the sermons (Luther preached there in 1539, as a plaque on a pillar commemorates) and yet mostly has to sit on the austere wooden seats with their backs to the sound, a pose that quickly results in cricked necks and lingering sciatica.
In truth there was only one piece in this concert that really lived up to the occasion, perhaps because the early part of the evening was interrupted by so many worthy speeches, and that was Bach’s short Ascension Oratorio in which the bass Henryk Bohm was the standout from the quartet of solo singers, his contribution coming across with clarity and resonance. For something extraordinary in the church, though, we only had to wait a couple of hours. At 9pm the Gewandhaus Orchestra was replaced by its Youth Choir, which filled the pews behind the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine for an event that was as moving for its political context as for its musical excellence. Some of the young players had been brought from Lviv but for the orchestra to gather, the male ones had to persuade the government in Kyiv to extract them from the fighting. Of the females, several are now refugees.
In Leipzig, the Gewandhaus community, the orchestra and choirs which with Kurt Masur were such a catalyst for the downfall of Communist East Germany in 1989, had the players staying in their homes – a taste of normality in the chaos. The concert was jointly conducted by Polina Lebedieva, still only 21, and the Gewandhaus Choir Master, Frank-Steffen Estler.
The programme, livestreamed on Facebook, revolved around Martin Luther’s hymn Grant Us Peace, which he wrote in 1529 when he realised that his calls for ecclesiastical reform were quickly leading to political conflict. His fears were all too justified, for Leipzig was besieged six times in the religious Thirty Years War that engulfed the German States less than a century later and Johann Schein, the Cantor of St. Thomas’s, lost many of his musicians to plague and injury. Luther’s text continues, ‘Grant our princes and all in authority peace and good governance, that under them we may lead a peaceful and quiet life.’
After Bach’s setting from his cantata BWV 42, the combined forces and soloists gave his longest cantata Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (I had much grief), BWV 21, Mahler’s Suite from Bach’s Orchestral Works (in which the YSOY’s principal flute, 17 year-old Medoliz Tymofiy, shone), and the world premiere of Australian composer Glynn Davies’ arrangement of the Suite on Ukrainian Themes by the 19th century Mykola Lyssenko, who studied in Leipzig and lived in St. Petersburg and Kyiv. The final piece was the most deeply emotional, though: Mendelssohn’s setting of those words of Luther’s. After the introduction for strings conducted by Estler, the male choral quintet of Amacordplus sang them only a few metres from where Luther had preached and as they did so, the conductors changed over and Lebedieva guided the final ensemble. It is hard to think of a moment when music has so effectively shamed the purveyors of war.
The orchestra were on stage again the next day, playing the Mahler and the Lyssenko pieces, but this time in the open air to the audience watching free in the main square. This showed their other side; still playing with finesse but carefree and relishing the warm day and the equal warmth of the casual listeners, many with small children, standing in the space before them.
As the afternoon turned to evening this public stage gradually became the heart of the festival, every seat at the tables of the temporary bars along the sides taken, in the standing area a constant churn of families and wandering spectators stopping to listen, often with little idea what they were listening to but impressed all the same. So they should have been, because when they had artists of the quality of violinist Lina Tur Bonet, one of today’s most accomplished baroque players, popping up to play a concerto, their luck was in. That was part of a glorious programme by the Mendelssohn Chamber Orchestra, Leipzig, which finished as the sun went down with his music from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And in between the fine music there was the straight-faced anarchy of P.D.Q. Bach, that superb creation of the American composer and comedian, Peter Schickele; his joke living on in Bach Town as the orchestra struggled to subdue an out-of-tune set of bagpipes, sundry whistles and bits of metal.
The next day on the same outdoor stage there was another unusual but much more agreeable wind instrument on show when the innovative group Holland Baroque were joined by Wu Wei, who is a virtuoso on the ancient Chinese bamboo mouth organ, the sheng. The sheng turns out to be an ideal instrument to add to a period ensemble, with a tone somewhere between the flute and oboe. In the arrangements made by Judith Steenbrink, the composer-violinist who leads Holland Baroque with her sister, harpsichordist Tineke, the sheng is integrated seamlessly into the European textures – almost as though a trading ship from Amsterdam with a full complement of musicians in about 1740 had suddenly had a spare week in Shanghai. A review of the recording made of the collaboration, Silk Baroque, will appear on the adjacent page, Present Arts on CD. In 2003 both Steenbrink sisters and Lina Tur Bonet were part of the annual training scheme that was the European Union Baroque Orchestra. Two years earlier I accompanied the orchestra to China, where it not only played in Shanghai and Beijing but also in industrial cities so unused to Europeans than women on the street were covering their children’s eyes in horror at the sight of such monsters. Maybe if we’d have a sheng player with us, the waters would have been smoothed.
Two other very different concerts complete this quick survey of the 2022 Leipzig Bach Festival. The Tomaskirche reverted to its authentic role as a church that incorporates substantial music into its service of what in England would be Evensong on the Friday afternoon. This was also free, of course, except for the €3 programme which was useful because it included the full harmonised music for the congregation’s sung responses. The music included two Bach works but also pieces by a wide selection of lesser-known composers like the 20th century Hugo Distler and the 16th century Slovenian Jacob Handl. Sadly, the performances by Bach Collegium Berlin had nowhere near the qualities of ensemble and vocal precision to match others in the festival like Les Talens Lyriques.
Finally, there was the true chamber atmosphere of the Trio Marvin playing C.P.E. Bach and Schubert in the beautiful cube of the 18th century mercantile heart of Leipzig, the Old Exchange. This elegant and airy room is the perfect setting for such music. It does have a very lively acoustic, however, so that while C.P.E. Bach’s Sonata in C Major, Wq 90 No. 3, was an uncomplicated delight, Schubert’s Trio in E flat major, D929, suffered from over-enthusiastic attack. In that room, not every accent needed to be sforzando and, even though Dasol Kim was playing on a Bluthner piano, not a bright Steinway, his brutal touch was more appropriate to Prokofiev than Schubert. Sometimes trying to be exciting just comes over as brash.
Overall, though, this festival was one of the most inspiring I have been to in many years. the balance between formal and informal concerts, full-priced and free or almost free, the depth of thought in the construction of programmes, and the variety of performers in terms of geography and age, established and emerging, was truly impressive – a model of how to use a contemporary city to bring to life the most rewarding music.
SM
Simon Mundy’s travel was covered by Nicky Thomas Media.