The time has come around for my visit to the Classical Music Appreciation group of the U3A and we had some topics detailed for us to discuss and to which to listen. Our convenor had told us about a talk on Radio 3 about ‘J S Bach – Man of Passion‘ which I tried to locate on BBC Sounds but evidently I had done something wrong because a search on my laptop revealed it immediately the following day. But my initially fruitless search revealed to me a real gem which was available to me on YouTube and this was an hour and a half long film on the life of Bach by John Eliot Gardiner which I viewed as preparation for the later group meeting and I found absolutely fascinating. Sir John Eliot Gardiner is widely considered one of the foremost living exponents of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, renowned for his vibrant, historically informed performances and rigorous scholarship. Through his foundational period-instrument groups—the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists—he has transformed how modern audiences experience Baroque choral and orchestral masterworks. The film was so informative as is showed views of the many churches to which Bach was affiliated and was unsparing in the detail of various aspects of Bach’s life. I, for one, had no idea that Bach was composing sublime music under the most trying of circumstances. As well as having 20 children, at one stage he was employed by a church and part of his duties was to give instruction to the pupils in subjects other than music (although he baulked at Latin) and his own accommodation as well as having paper-thin walls meant that the noise of the pupils intruded upon his own living space. We also learnt that at he time there was no real decorum in the way in which people interacted with the churches with none of the reverence and respect that we associate with churches today. So whilst Bach and his musicians were trying to play the latest cantata (often produced at the rate of one per week as his church employers demanded) the church was a noisy place with constant interruptions, chatter of the congregation and even on one occasion having pigs driven through the church as it happened to be the shortest way to the local market. To modern day audiences, we cannot even start to imagine the conditions under which musicians had to work, not least subject to the competing whims of factions within whatever church or municipality employed him. I was shocked to learn that the sublime St John Passion had to be radically revised several times over to meet the wishes of the local church grandees and it was only in subsequent years that Bach was able to restore the whole of the St John Passion to its former glory. The videoclip of this John Eliot Gardiner film I found to be very accessible so I am going to stitch the YouTube URL into the web page that I had previously prepared on Mozart arias so that the rest of the Classical Music Group can get the same pleasure and enjoyment from the film as I did. Almost certainly, I will watch this film over and over again because I do not think it will be one of which I will ever tire. Turning to more mundane matters, it now appears that it is possible that we shall have some rainfall within the next day or so. The weather forecasts is for summer intervals, variable cloud and the occasional shower and we did receive a small shower in the middle of the night a day or so ago. Before getting too excited, though, the long range weather forecast is for perhaps another heatwave in September and no really significant rainfall until October.
This was my normal weekly shopping day and I purchased some of the slow-cooked port ribs which we had eaten the Sunday before last and proved to be so tasty. As this is the last of the weekly shops before we go on our Yorkshire trip in a week’s time, I tried to think ahead and purchase one or two extra items that would be useful to consume on our rail journey northwards or be useful to us once we are safely encamped in our hotel bedrooms. Lunch needed to be a quick affair and started with a portion of quiche supplemented by some sun-dried tomatoes bought earlier in the day. I got to the meeting of the Classical Music Group and there were only five of us in attendance but during August, holidays take their toll. But I knew that one of the other members of the group was due to go on holiday to visit the classic Andalusian cities in Southern Spain so I located a whole series of books and guides about these from my travel-book bookcase and was happy for her to have them so she should do some reading up before the trip itself. We started off by playing the first two items of the opening night of the proms and then discussed some of the facets of the life of George Gershwin as we had just listened to ‘An American in Paris’ Then the convenor played us the half hour BBC sounds programme on the life of Bach to which I had listened early in the morning by way of preparation. I had managed to stitch in the URL reference to the 1.5 hour on the life of Bach I had accessed via YouTube the day before. Instead of making up a whole new website for the sake of one clickable link, I stitched the reference into my Mozart page and ensured this was easily accessible via one of my own web pages. After tea and biscuits and a chat, I returned home. One item reported in the news is that railway investigators have found some ‘irregularities’ in the track which was the site of the derailment last week. It looks as though the extreme heat may have caused the ground to move and the rail to distort but a videoclip taken by a train running in the opposite direction gives a visual indication of the rail irregularity. Tonight my friend and I are going to forgo our walk in the park as we are attending a funeral tomorrow morning and we both feel the need for an early night before we get dressed up in our ‘mourning’ clothes tomorrow. Funerals are not happy occasions but it gives the opportunity for me to reinforce friendships I have forged with members of the parish community since Meg’s death.