On 06.09.2007 John Howell wrote:
Modern performances with one singer on a part do not use young boys whose voices have not
changed, or young university men whose voices have not been thoroughly trained. At least
that is true of every example I have heard. In fact, every example I've heard has been
recorded with highly trained, professional singers with well developed voices which
project and can, with only four of them, fill a small hall over a small orchestra quite
adequately. (I would call them "opera singers," but I don't want to suggest
their skills are limited to that one genre at all.) One of the basses I've heard on such
recordings was Jan Opalach, a very fine and very well trained professional bass even when
I worked with him at Indiana in the mid-'70s.
BACH DID NOT USE OPERA SINGERS, or professional singers of any kind!!!! He
couldn't. He didn't have access to such singers. He had what he had, and the
best of them at any given time were his soloists.
Let me hear good modern performances using the EXACT forces Bach had access to
and not gussied up with professional soloists, nor rebalanced in the recording
process, and I will readily concede that such performances were POSSIBLE. That
has no bearing at all on whether they were what actually happened, some of the
time or even all of the time, which still rests on the interpretation of a
large amount of evidence.
You are, of course, absolutely correct. Yet, the problem is, we simply
cannot get boy's voices of the same age which Bach had at his disposal
these days. The only way to get them would be hormone treatment.
Question is, what will come closer to a single boy's voice, a single,
early music trained female voice, or a whole choir of them? I do wonder.
We are not really talking about opera singers here.
Incidentally I have heard boys sing the arias in the John Passion. Only
very few boys can do that today satisfyingly. They are probably the most
taxing arias in the Bach repertoire, yet we do know that these were sung
by one boy only (unless someone is going to argue that they were also
sung by the whole choir, which would be a rather novel aspect to the
whole argument). When I heard it, two boys were used at once, otherwise
it would have been too embarassing.
(As to the comparison of Leipzig with Dresden, I would assume that the Dresden
court DID have professional singers, unlike the Leipzig churches.)
Yes, only the B minor mass was a church work, and the performance would
not have used the opera choir, nor singers. That whole story is a little
more complex than what people think. I recommend reading the research on
this first.
Johannes
--
http://www.musikmanufaktur.com
http://www.camerata-berolinensis.de
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