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film review: Bach & friends
Jul. 14th, 2010 11:38 pmA couple weeks ago I got an e-mailed invitation: SFCV, for which I write, was sponsoring the west coast premiere of a documentary film called Bach & Friends. All right, a free movie, not a bad deal even though I had to go up to the City to see it, and I tried out the New Mexico restaurant nearby for dinner on the way.
The film consists of medium-length (a couple minutes or so at a time) cuts of interviews with various musicians, some of them quite well-known, about what Bach means to them. Pretty much an unending string of superlatives. Philip Glass is particularly vapid, something that will not surprise anyone who dislikes his music. Most of the cuts are put together the same way. You see and hear the musician playing something by Bach. Then the audio track of the same person interviewed is overlaid on the music* and the visuals cut between them. Almost all the shots are extreme close-ups, at nostril-hair level, sometimes indeed shot from that angle.
Although Bach is praised for his protean quality, almost all the music is from one narrow slice of Bach: intricately contrapuntal works for solo instrument, keyboard, violin, or cello. Some are played on different instruments, up to and including the ukulele; some are even sung, by the Swingle Singers, but this is still arrangements of instrumental music. No vocal music of any kind, hardly any instrumental chorales, no orchestral music or chamber music, and except for a tiny excerpt from the Minuet in G not even any of Bach's more demotic keyboard music: the likes of the Italian Concerto, for instance, were conspicuous by absence. The film ends with The Art of Fugue, and that's the condition it's been building up to all along.
Some good lines, and a few interesting sequences, like the pianist who gets wheeled into an MRI with a tiny keyboard under his fingers, so that the scientists can watch his brain waves while he improvises. And I liked the Disklavier that was programmed to reproduce Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations, though it didn't say how they accomplish this. As someone points out, it achieves Gould's fondest dream: he gives a live performance without having to be there. (However, he could have done this with a piano roll in 1910, so it's not exactly a new realization.)
*tough titty if you want to just hear the music; for that, you have to buy the supplementary DVD.
The film consists of medium-length (a couple minutes or so at a time) cuts of interviews with various musicians, some of them quite well-known, about what Bach means to them. Pretty much an unending string of superlatives. Philip Glass is particularly vapid, something that will not surprise anyone who dislikes his music. Most of the cuts are put together the same way. You see and hear the musician playing something by Bach. Then the audio track of the same person interviewed is overlaid on the music* and the visuals cut between them. Almost all the shots are extreme close-ups, at nostril-hair level, sometimes indeed shot from that angle.
Although Bach is praised for his protean quality, almost all the music is from one narrow slice of Bach: intricately contrapuntal works for solo instrument, keyboard, violin, or cello. Some are played on different instruments, up to and including the ukulele; some are even sung, by the Swingle Singers, but this is still arrangements of instrumental music. No vocal music of any kind, hardly any instrumental chorales, no orchestral music or chamber music, and except for a tiny excerpt from the Minuet in G not even any of Bach's more demotic keyboard music: the likes of the Italian Concerto, for instance, were conspicuous by absence. The film ends with The Art of Fugue, and that's the condition it's been building up to all along.
Some good lines, and a few interesting sequences, like the pianist who gets wheeled into an MRI with a tiny keyboard under his fingers, so that the scientists can watch his brain waves while he improvises. And I liked the Disklavier that was programmed to reproduce Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations, though it didn't say how they accomplish this. As someone points out, it achieves Gould's fondest dream: he gives a live performance without having to be there. (However, he could have done this with a piano roll in 1910, so it's not exactly a new realization.)
*tough titty if you want to just hear the music; for that, you have to buy the supplementary DVD.
