Bach was an ordinary person, too
Conductor Leonardo García Alarcón is excited to show Amsterdam audiences a lesser-known side of Bach. ‘Bach wasn’t just a brilliant, serious, sainted composer – he also happened to be an ordinary person who could enjoy himself in a cafe with a beer, coffee and good music’.
The Baroque expert Leonardo García Alarcón made an impressive Concertgebouw Orchestra debut back in October 2022. He now returns to conduct a programme juxtaposing works by Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, as Bach himself might well have done on the evening concerts he organised at the Zimmermann coffee house in Leipzig from 1729 onwards.
Bach and Handel - 25 and 27 October
The Argentinian harpsichordist and conductor is very much looking forward to working with the Concertgebouw Orchestra again. He says, ‘I’ve admired the orchestra since I was a child. When I was eight years old, my grandmother gave me a cassette of Bach’s St Matthew Passion performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under the direction of Eugen Jochum. When I heard that music for the first time, I was absolutely stunned. It was a formative experience that helped make Bach the most important composer in my life.’
Although Alarcón’s choice to conduct Bach this time around will come as a surprise to no one, the works he has selected are unexpected and refreshing, as are the unusual order in which they are performed and the addition of music by Handel.
‘Bach and Handel are often wrongly pitted against each other,’ he says, ‘Bach as the serious church musician with so many duties and obligations, and Handel as the fancy-free composer of opera. It’s important to remember, though, that Handel didn’t just take the popular Italian genre with him to London – he also wrote sacred music himself. And Bach wasn’t just a brilliant, serious, sainted composer – he was also very much a bon vivant.’
It’s possible that Bach himself sang these very same arias on one of those cosy evening concerts at the Zimmermann coffee house.
Alarcón aims to show that Bach and Handel were on an equal footing: ‘I’ve chosen two well-known, similarly scored orchestral works by these composers, each featuring an unusual amount of brass for the time. We begin with Bach’s festive Orchestral Suite No. 3, which he composed for one of his concerts at the legendary Zimmermann coffee house, and we conclude with Music for the Royal Fireworks, in which Handel showcases all his erudition.’
Alarcón alternates movements from these two major orchestral works with arias from two relatively little-known secular cantatas by Bach in order to create a particularly exciting dialogue. He adds, ‘I’m so happy Andreas Wolf was available, as I think he’s one of the best Bach singers today. The fact that I’ve programmed bass arias exclusively is no coincidence, either: it’s possible that Bach himself sang these very same arias on one of those cosy evening concerts at the Zimmermann coffee house.’
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Written by Noortje Zanen for Preludium
This is an extract from the programme notes to the concerts on 11 October and 13 October. You can read the full text (in Dutch) here.