Robert Quinney: 6 things … I love about Bach

One such admirer of Bach is Robert Quinney, Director of the Choir of New College, Oxford, and more pertinently for us, organist. On 3 March Quinney takes to our own Royal Festival Hall organ to present an evening devoted to the composer’s uplifting works, concluding with the epic Passacaglia BWV.582

Ahead of this recital, Quinney kindly took some time out to share with us six things he loves about Bach.

His communicative quality

When I play or listen to Bach’s music it feels as if he is speaking directly to me. This is an illusion, of course – we aren’t holding a séance – but it suggests there is an individuality, a personal voice somehow encoded in his music. One which we can decode in spite of the difference between Bach’s time and place and ours.

The physical delight of playing Bach

Bach’s sonatas for organ, all set in a sparse three-part texture derived from Arcangelo Corelli, are notoriously challenging for brain, limbs and digits alike. But once the notes are thoroughly learned, it’s simply thrilling to dance over the pedals and race up and down the manuals (as we call the organ keyboards). Organists are able, literally, to embody a complete musical texture, one which ranges from the chamber music of the sonatas to the almost symphonic scale of works such as the Toccata and Fugue in F, and Passacaglia.

Bach is history

Bach’s music excites the historical curiosity that is so much part of our musical culture, especially in relation to the more distant past. Perhaps, though, it isn’t so much that Bach is of his time, but that his music has come to define the period in which he lived. The term ‘Baroque music’ immediately conjures a piece of Bach, and for me it’s the second Brandenburg Concerto, which must be the remnant of some mostly-forgotten music lesson.

Bach is now

Though it may definitively be ‘Baroque’, Bach’s music isn’t bound by historical specificities. It speaks to us here and now, as it has done to generations of musicians, most of whom knew and cared nothing about other music of his time (except perhaps Handel in some cases). How about having Mozart, Beethoven, Clara and Robert Schumann, Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, Stravinsky, Bartók, Kurtág, Keith Jarrett and the great Benny Andersson – yes, the ABBA keyboardist – in your fan club?

Bach’s stylistic promiscuity

The two Toccatas and Fugues I’m playing at the Southbank Centre on 3 March demonstrate an audacious mash-up of styles – principally North German Toccata and Italian Concerto. The first movement of Sonata V in particular is something of a duo-concerto-sonata, with the two hands as the soloists and the feet providing the basso continuo. Bach’s contemporaries, to go by the scant evidence we have, were not universally pleased by his transgression of stylistic boundaries; they thought it was in rather poor taste. But this subtly subversive quality is, for me, one of the chief delights of his music.

Bach was an organist

Bach was most celebrated in his lifetime not as a composer, but as a performer. He was also an expert in organ design – for example, he was paid around half of his annual freelance income, for a thorough inspection of the new organ at Naumburg in September 1746. Organists then have a special kinship with this great composer, something we can’t say about many others, indeed no-one really qualifies until Olivier Messiaen in the 20th century. For organists, quite simply, Bach is one of us.