Bach's Dresden jaunt

That noblest of riverside views* was snapped in a heatwave last summer; in fact I've been in the contrasting strongholds of Baden-Baden and Thuringia, and nothing could have been closer to heaven than the greatest of B minor Masses on Easter Sunday in the Bethlehem of Bach-lovers, Eisenach. Bach was baptised there on 23 March 1685 in the very font (pictured below after the concert) we saw flanked by players of Prague's superlative Collegium/Collegium Vocale 1704. I've written something about this and other wonders of Bachland over on The Arts Desk.

Then, if ever, was the time to take with me John Eliot Gardiner's Music in the Castle of Heaven and read it from cover to cover (which I now nearly have, excepting the lengthy descriptions of the two major Passions, which I'll save for when I next listen to them properly). Even in a volume full of JEG's extraordinary blend of passionate enthusiasm and intellectual rigour - with plenty of speculation, given the gaps in the JSB biography, all of which strikes me as entirely plausible - the chapter on the B minor Mass is overwhelmingly impressive. Extreme care in devotion is needed when dealing with the greatest mass ever (yes, I know, there's Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, but sorry, that's a bit of a blind spot for me, and a lung-busting horror to sing, though I can see the genius) and Gardiner is as good on the history as he is on the music in detail.

It's fascinating, for instance, to read of what may have happened when Bach went to Dresden in 1733 to see his eldest son, Wilhelm  Friedemann, settled in as organist of the Sophienkirche. Clearly the Kyrie and Gloria - the only two mass sequences admitted in Lutheran practice - featured, like nearly everything else in what was to become his complete mass masterpiece, 'parodies' of earlier inspirations, but seen to have been specially tailored for the sumptuous Court Orchestra and its Italian operatic soloists. The rest, as we now know, wasn't entirely ready until two years before his death, but it's exciting to know about the music's intermediate putting-down of roots.

That turned me back to the two other Collegium 1704 recordings which a Czech benefactor sent me a couple of years ago featuring church music by Jan Dismas Zelenka, then the main man in Dresden and Bach's good friend. Of course anything is going to seem one-dimensional after the four of Bach, but I was charmed by the Requiem in D Zelenka composed for the year-long obsequies, also starting in 1733, in honour of that mostly ridiculous ruler and fortune squanderer Augustus the Strong. Charmed? Yes, because it's not the usual heavy-hearted affair. How odd to hear a Kyrie begin in bold major with drums and trumpets - the emphasis being on the 'lux per perpetua', presumably - and a Dies Irae that starts in incredibly jolly fashion.

Nothing outstays its welcome here, and though the writing for solo or paired instruments is penny-plain alongside Bach's, it's good to hear the chalumeau and to savour the bassoons chuntering downwards at the bass's Offertorium lines about Tartarus (Gardiner tells us how delighted Bach must have been by the Dresden bassoonists; apparently the Leipzig fagottist was feeble).

The Officio defunctorum, also for not-so-strong Augustus, on the other disc is more long winded but also stranger in parts; ditto the Responsoria pro hebdomadad sancta of 1723 in a second Collegium set, with some astounding chromatics and firework word-setting.

Above all, of course, I've been back to Collegium 1704's B minor Mass, which reveals how much that vital conductor Václav Luks has changed since the recording was made. I'd love to know what the players felt about the very special circumstances of the Eisenach performance.

I'll certainly never forget it - the crowning glory of an Easter Sunday which began in style with a Cranach masterpiece as focal point, and a more modest Bach mass to punctuate, in Weimar's Herderkirche. This shot, I hasten to add, taken long before the service began, with the church packed when we arrived.

*One that Bach very nearly lived to see. At the end of Gardiner's Chapter 13 there's another beguiling speculation - that he was readying the B minor Mass for the inauguration of the Catholic Hofkirche (the church on the right), finally completed the year after his death. The famous Frauenkirche (the dome to the left), a people's venture, which rose only to fall in World War II and rise again, improbably, in recent years - I saw both the ruins and the completion - must have been appearing on the skyline too.

Bach according to Gardiner

Monday was a day for finally meeting extended deadlines after much gadding about, so I couldn't attend the Albert Hall Bach marathon brilliantly masterminded by the nearly-septuagenarian John Eliot (photographed in action above and further below by the ever-dependable Chris Christodoulou). But his Easter cantata recordings have been a constant presence in my own, much slower listening marathon this year so far, and earlier in the week we caught up with his BBC 2 documentary Bach: A Passionate Life.

The title may seem a tad lame, but JEG delivered what he promised, contradicting the image we know so well of the rather stern, bewigged 61-year-old with a wealth of fiery, inspired excerpts - and not always the expected ones - from a cornucopia of masterpieces. Gardiner's father, by the way, used to own what may have been a second version by the artist Elias Gottlob Haussmann of the famous portrait, since bought by an American.

I was not so well versed about Bach's life as to know, for instance, that he was flung into prison at the end of his Weimar time. Oh, those tyrannical patrons! At least he wasn't executed, like other musicians. We learned how his difficult, even paranoiac temperament was formed by major family bereavements in his youth (a psychologist popped up, sometimes stating the obvious). JEG's chilly ambles around snowy towns gave a good sense of each, especially Eisenach with its castle where Luther had earlier walled up.

Above all, what a difference to have a presenter who knows in depth what he's talking about (and I'm not talking about hugely irritant, self-admiring and patchily knowledgeable telly regulars like Andrew Graham-Dixon, who started out so well but has become unwatchable, in my eyes at any rate). This, though it could have extended to at least another episode, was up there with Antonio Pappano's Opera Italia - and more recently John Adams as eloquent speaker had the lion's share of Mark Kidel's also too-brief portrait.

You'd not actually know from Gardiner's demeanour here that he raises the blood pressure of many a performer (I know two who won't even let me mention his name in their presence, and there's an unsavoury joke or two floating around). He interacts keenly with talking heads from other fields, some perceptive, some less so. He brings helpful details and images to the performances with trusted musical friends, though we still never get a piece from start to finish. Kati Debretzeni gave us some phenomenal violin playing, and I liked the smiley approach of soprano Julia Doyle. There's no doubt that Bach's his God, as he should be every sentient being's.

As his extended note on the Easter set of his Bach pilgrimage reveals, Gardiner is especially passionate about the all-choral Easter Sunday cantata (let's follow Duccio altarpanels for the three celebratory days). 'Christ lag in Todesbanden', BWV 4, is a pre-Leipzig masterpiece - Bach composed it for his probationary audition at Muhlhausen in 1707 - and the first I've come across to be written entirely for choral voices. The narrative is not about the resurrected Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene in the garden, that scene so movingly set by Adams in The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Instead Bach sets all seven verses which Luther wrote to the old hymn, dealing with the struggle that's already taken place, and so there's little of the expected Easter jubilation.

E minor dominates. The composer's identity pops up as the violins leap free towards the end of the opening Sinfonia. The choral writing is stunning and extraordinarily varied. Gardiner makes much of the semitonal wail Bach fashions by altering two notes of the original hymn, and I love the 'syncopated riff' that bursts forth on the 'Halleluja's in verse one. Gardiner is right to invoke the atmospheric austerity of Bergman's The Seventh Seal as Luther narrates a time when Death held sway and Bach matches the chill (sopranos and altos, verse two). Christ's rout takes time and is splendidly physical; then in verse 5 the basses play priests, their line culminating in a long-held top D, after which exultant and dancing delights mark the victory - but still, at the end, in E minor. Here's Harnoncourt's recording on YouTube.

There's not much to say about the Easter Monday and Tuesday cantatas. Both 'Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen', BWV 66 and 'Ein Herz, das seinem Jesum lebend weiss', BWV 134, were presented as part of Bach's first Leipzig Easter of 1724. He had laboured on the mighty St John Passion for Good Friday, and revised 'Christ lag in Todesbanden' for Easter Sunday. So it is understandable if, given the jubilant tone of the continuing celebrations, he simply adapted two secular works written during his time in Cöthen under the benign (and significanly non-Lutheran) Prince Leopold.

BWV 66, for road-to-Emmaus day, was originally a birthday serenade, with the allegorical figures of Happiness and Fame transformed here into Hope and an initially craven, finally self-transcending Fear. There's plenty of brilliant, 6/8 dance music for alto and tenor. Ditto in BWV 134, its first incarnation a New Year piece of 1719, where the tenor gets another movement Gardiner describes as 'Passepied-like', and - a bit of irreverence here - amuses with the bark-like as well as Bach-like refrains of 'Auf, auf!'. Duccio shows us the day's theme of Christ appearing to the Apostles (it can't be the Last Supper because Judas is absent).

Gardiner points out the 'Brandenburg-like swagger and rhythmical elan' of Bach's midway duet (the six great concertos as well as the other major orchestral and instrumental works were also written during his happy time with the Calvinist prince, if not all specifically for Leopold, of course). 'Those years in Cöthen seem to have been the happiest in Bach's life'. Amen to that. Here's Leonhardt for 'Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen'

and Rilling for 'Ein Herz, das seinem Jesum...': far from ideal, but the only alternative had Rene Jacobs as the alto, and do you know how awful he was? Not much better as a conductor, IMO. Anyway, this also gives us Piero della Francesca's wonderful depiction of the Resurrection, which I've still to see in out-of-the-way San Sepolcro.

Our Easter music came courtesy of the choir and splendid (uncredited) organist of Chichester Cathedral. The Saturday evening service was remakable less for the mass setting and anthem -  Flor Peeters' Missa festiva and Messiaen's O sacrum convivium - than for the telescoped vigil-variation on the Orthodox darkness to light theme: we began in pitch black, the choir lit their candles, we lit ours and later the lights blazed on John Piper's fabulous altarpiece as glimpsed through the 15th century screen. The commission of the first and the replacement of the second were the work of Chichester's most inspirational dean, Walter Hussey, about whom I must write more at a later date. Photo taken, I hasten to add, after the service.

The balance of first-class contemporary artwork - if 1966 can be called 'contemporary' - with the old tuned in nicely with a sermon to which I listened for once. The theme was how the Gospels begin with elderly people -  Elizabeth, Anne, Zacharias, Simeon - waiting for a change, until by the time of the Resurrection the new generation surrounds the risen Christ.

Our hostess Themy, whom I joshingly refer to as 'a Christian in Parsee's clothing', found me some more short, clear sermons to read by a man of the greatest common sense and humility, Eric James, a major guiding light for her but sadly no longer with us. Don't misunderstand me: my agnosticism remains the same, but I warm to essential Christian wisdom when I can find it.

Sunday's Eucharist, to which we are heading in the above picture, revealed one of the best masses I've ever heard, and never knew before  - Kodaly's Missa brevis: did that man ever write a dull piece? - and a resounding triumph for the organist, who rounded off the previous movements from Vierne's Second Symphony with the dizzying jubilation of Bach's G major Prelude and Fugue. So we came full circle to the god of music again.