Bach with Trumpets and Drums!

Piccolo Trumpet

Valveless (Natural) Trumpet

Piccolo Trumpet

On Saturday the 9^th, Katie and I headed out to hear the Bach Choir.  (There's a Bach Choir in Britain, as well, but this is the local one, established in Bethlehem, PA, a million years ago.)  We had already got tickets, and I had dreamed of hearing this choir for close to 50 years, so Katie---always ready for an adventure---set out.  Knowing we were leaving Wilpo for a Big City, Bethlehem, the chances of finding Chinese food a little more authentic than at home was good, so we left home early.

Katie decided to take the road less traveled, and the GPS took us all over the place, sometimes instructing us to take sudden turns, to avoid congestion.  Finally, we were in Bethlehem!  But the Chinese restaurant we had wanted to go to had closed down, :( but we soon found another one, and had a wonderful lunch.

Presently we were at the First Presbyterian Church---why do they number these churches?  My aunt attended the First Methodist Church in Phoenix, and I had always wanted to get to the the other Methodist churches: the second, and the third, and so on.  For many of the Third Shall be First, and vice versa, and verse visa.

Both the Bach Magnificat and Cantata 63 (Christen, ätzet diesen Tag, BWV 63) feature high Bach trumpets, as well as interesting combinations of soloists.  Perhaps they had found two specialists in high trumpet (not something a typical trumpeter can be confident about) and decided to perform these two, which are appropriate for the season.

First of all, I just loved the contralto soloist (a mezzo-soprano, really) called Luthien Brackett, who despite having a quiet voice, did a fabulous job, and lent a lot of charm to the set of 5 soloists on the dais!  She alone would have been worth the price of admission---almost.

The orchestra---a small one---was beyond excellent.  The strings were lovely, but being about a 150 feet away, we couldn't hear well enough to give a critical appraisal.  But the tympani, the flutes, oboes, trumpet(s?) and bassoon, and the portative organ, were just fabulous.  This is the first time I have been in the same room as a portative organ, but I did not go up close, for fear that they'd think I wanted to smuggle it out of the church.

Another surprise was the Bach Trumpet.  Johann Sebastian Bach wrote amazingly florid but tasteful, lovely parts for high trumpet.  At the time of the first Bach revival of around the middle 1800's, the trumpeters available were baffled as to how to play these parts; they were so high, and so florid.  The first line of attack was to invent a new sort of trumpet, called a (high) Bach trumpet, that enabled some trumpeters to play these lines.  There are wonderful trumpet parts in the Brandenburg Concertos, a couple of the Orchestral Suites ('Ouvertures'), and some of the celebratory cantatas and choruses, such as those in the B minor Mass, and in the Christmas Oratorio.  Now, with the new Bach Trumpet, these trumpet parts could be played.

The Bach Trumpet unfortunately does not have the traditional appearance of a trumpet, but rather looks like something that MI5 dreamed up to crack enemy coded transmissions.  I wouldn't have known what it was, if I had been shown one, if not for the fact that Flip Herfort, my friend and teacher, had demonstrated one to me a week before.  In the 1970's straight trumpets that looked like heraldric trumpets began to be used---some of them with little holes on the side, instead of the valves on modern trumpets,  (To see one, find a video of the Christmas Oratorio, or the Weihnachts­oratorium, on YouTube; the video of John Elliot Gardiner and the English Bach Soloists will have three gentlemen playing straight trumpets), which makes them close to chromatic in the higher registers.

The first chorus of the Cantata had an interesting feature.  At the third line (or somewhere in the middle, anyway,) the harmony takes an abrupt left turn, and modulates to the relative minor.  In Bach's time, the congregations were probably accustomed to these harmonic jinks, but today, I'm sure Federal Safety Standards require a more sedate harmonic rhythm!  Bach has done this in other places; the opening chorus of BWV 147, for instance.  I don't think conductor Chris J. could have done much to ameliorate the violence of this modulation, but the congregation seemed to take it with great equanimity.

Well, to conclude, writing about music is always a bit of an iffy proposition; you have to hear what you're talking about.  It's a relatively easy operation to hunt down the two pieces on YouTube, and numerous video clips of Luthien Tinuviel singing.  Give yourself a treat!

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