period instruments – Bach | Music | Conducting | Ensemble Direction | Violoncello da spalla | Viola da spalla | Conducting

Bach Methodology

Bach, Blog, Early Music, Essays, Marlboro Music / Koji Otsuki

Since I left the Midwest and moved back to Philadelphia a couple of years ago, I haven’t made music with any period instrumentalists here. In early January this year, I debuted my violoncello da spalla, beautifully built by Dmitry Badiarov, in a concert of Bach cantata BWV 41 with the period instruments, but that was not in Philadelphia— it was in Bloomington, Indiana. I should be networking harder to make early music connections here, indeed, but it isn’t easy for me… It is so true that your networking base and strong connections are developed while you’re in school, and it gets much harder after that. But since I left Bloomington, […]

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Period Instruments and Bach

(Originally posted in February 2010) Sometimes people ask me if I like any Bach performances on the modern instruments. Somehow they expect me to say ‘no,’ but my answer is actually ‘yes,’ with an asterisk. Those people who expected me to say ‘no’ might have heard me lightly criticize modern performances on some occasions.. I don’t deny I do that sometimes. But when I did that, I must have had no expectation as to what I was going to hear. When I hear the metal string sound from the high-tension turbo-charged modern violin with a continuous vibrato playing Bach, out of the blue, I may get a bit displeased. But