BACH The Orchestral Suites - An Inktroduction

What is it about Bach's music which is so.... music ? When I bought my very first recording of classical music way back in 1987, it was for the simple fact that it had the word "flute" on the cover. I did not care for the two big names on the cassette, namely Mozart and Bach. Completely bemused by this new experience of actually buying a classical music recording, it simply made no difference to me who they were.

I fell in love with the Mozart Flute Concerto (No.2, K314) for a couple of years, then got sick of it. On the other side of the tape was Bach's Orchestral Suite No.2 in B minor. Whereas in those first years I knew I loved the Mozart, I remember now how profoundly calm I felt whenever I flipped the tape to the Bach side. It was not ear candy, it was like meeting something or someone full of wisdom, who respected your naivete yet was willing to speak to you. There was something strangely full of fatherly love yet brimming with detached intelligence.

Whenever I listened to the Second Suite, something in my mind would constantly be telling me, "Hey, this is serious music! Are you sure you're old enough?" But a voice seem to also flow into my ear, just as the vivid, liquid sound of the flute rolled and weaved around the air. It said to me something without words, and today, when I think about it, it is like trying to imagine Bach's voice. Every movement is hypnotic, from the ominous opening Overture to the sad Rondeau and Sarabande, the hectic Bourrée with its chugging strings, the solemn but utterly graceful Polonaise, with its swirling flute solos; to the dignified resignation of the penultimate Menuet, and then the microcosmic grandeur of the famous Badinerie. The whole makes me tremble with admiration.

The Orchestral Suites, along with the Brandenburg Concertos and other orchestral works, are some of the best examples of abstract music at its most... music. How does one describe music for music's sake? In Bach's music, when he is not word-painting, the essence of musical thought seems to reach as perfect expression as possible. No pictures, no stories, no individual personalities appear when one listens to the music, although we can of course try to attach pictures to them. To me, this partly explains the universal love of Bach throughout the world; something in his art seems irrevocably, even irresistibly human.

Right: Detail from an anonymous painting, first half of 18th century.

The Suite, as I have noted elsewhere, is a French form - a collective term for a set (hence "suite") of dances. It would be hard to actually physically dance to these Orchestral Suites, for in fact they are more like abstract musical essays on dance form; perhaps a Baroque equivalent of "symphonic dances". When you listen to them, dance not with your feet, but with your mind.

It remains titillatingly unclear why or for whom Bach wrote these Suites for. In Baroque Germany, composers called the form Ouvertüren, a reference to the opening movement. When Jean-Baptiste Lully (of Killed by Conducting fame) extracted the overture and selected dance movements from his operas, he created the first Orchestral Suites. And indeed, this "collect and play the best orchestral bits" idea continues today.

Let's use this idea. Perhaps we can see Bach's Orchestral Suites as the individual movements he favoured, extracted from the operas he never composed. What marvellous musical dramas they could have been. The silent voices that ring in between these celebrations of C major, D major and B minor, seem to be the very ones which deny us the answer to the many questions we have on Bach's mysteriously (mostly) unrecorded life.

And yet, here we have today cantatas by the hundreds composed by Bach. What would a Bach opera have sounded like?

Suite No.1 seems to reside in some pastoral paradise, with its noble overture, its skipping Gavottes, its gay Forlane and graceful Menuets, concluding with a most dignified Passepeid. Even as I write these descriptions, I experience two things: first, my attempt to picture the music fails because the music really brings to mind something too... universal to describe. Second, the adjectives "noble", "skipping", "gay", "graceful" and "dignified" does nothing to define the music, and yet these feelings I get listening to them is exactly the essence I find in the music.

Suite No.4 opens kingly, with trumpets and drums, striding grandly to the fore. Momentum is vital in all dances, particularly in this suite. Like the Overture of the Third Suite, the Bourrée - one of my favourite movements - is a prime example of this momentum in action; of different lines of music moving at seemingly different levels and speeds. The Gavotte and Menuets are suffused with relaxed grandeur. The universal portrait of Bach seems to revolve before us, his face smiling in majestic beneficence.

Suite No.3 is home to the famous "Air on the G-string". But before that is an Overture demonstrating Bach's moving architecture at its best - short trumpet motifs ricochet off chugging strings, while the chinkling harpsichord dances around the micro-universe of turning, spiraling lines.

The Air is Bach at his most universal. This is no longer Baroque music, it is again music at its most music. Somehow, when he wrote this piece, when orchestras play it, Bach extended the spirit of his composing hand into some place all humans come from. Somehow, in composing it, Bach extended his music beyond 1685, beyond 1750. Future generations have and will continue to hear it; past generations are like Dante's Virgil, condemned as "Virtuous Pagans" who - alas - lived too early to hear this music, and yet must have caught something of its essence by simply being human. And yet, there is no Time to this beautiful Air, no standard for which its Beauty can be judged. It just is; could have come from the hand of a 16th century composer, or the pen of a 20th century composer. It is neither ancient, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern - and yet it is music which could have come from any of these periods. When I play it, it fills my room, and like its namesake, becomes the very Air we all breathe.

Bach's Orchestral Suites: Recordings Survey

Curiously, when he was 14 years old, Chia Han-Leon also managed to resolve his identity crisis. By shopping frequently. (For random classical music casettes).

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