Bach Masterwork

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 663, 21 March 1952, Page 10

Bach Masterwork

N outstanding team was brought together by the BBC in July last year when it broadcast in its Home Service Bach’s Mass in B Minor. The soloists were Suzanne Danco (soprano), Kathleen Ferrier (contralto), Peter Pears (tenor), Bruce Boyce (baritone), and Norman Walker (bass). With them. appeared the BBC Chorus (with Leslie Woodgate as chorus-master), the Boyd Neel Orchestra (with Maurice Clare, well known to New Zealanders, as leader), Douglas Moore (horn), George Malcolm (harpsichord), and Charles Spinks (organ). Georges Enesco was conductor. The Mass in B Minor broadcast on that occasion was fecorded and transcribed for listeners in other parts of the world, and it will have its first New Zealand broadcast from 4YZ at 1.45 p.m. on Sunday, March 30. It will be heard from 4YA in the week starting April 7, from 3YA towards the end of April, and later from other stations. The performance lasts two hours and a quarter, Generally regarded as one of music’s noblest masterpieces, the Mass in B

Minor was com-. pleted in 1738, but \ the first complete | performances were not given till 1834 (Rare 1\ and 12325

(Part 2)-more than 80 years after Bach’s death. Bach prepared the first two sections of the Mass-the Kyrie and the Gloria-to accompany a petition to the Elector of Saxony in which he asked for the! title of Court-Composer, but there is no evidence that the rest of the work was sent to the King. "The circumstance that Augustus III was a Roman Catholic, like his father, may conceivably have caused Bach to set the Ordinary of the Mass," wrote Harold Rutland in a Radio Times programme note to the BBC broadcast. "On the other hand, the Kyrie and Gloria, sung in Latin,’ were part of the ritual of the Lutheran Church. Although Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, described the B Minor as a ‘great Catholic Mass,’ it is unlikely that Bach himself had a liturgical purpose in mind; for this, indeed, the work is unsuitable."