concert review: California Bach Society

A friend had a ticket to this concert that they couldn't use, so passed it on to me. I'm not normally much of a consumer of Baroque choral music, but I don't dislike it by any means, so I was happy to go. And it turned out to be a good concert. A tiny round church in Palo Alto resembling a concrete flying saucer but with excellent acoustics, and a small choir with an impressive sound. That one of the altos is an old fannish friend is only a plus. But I was especially taken with the tenors, often a choir's weak link but powerfully strong here despite there being only five of them. And the whole directed by Paul Flight, who has a very good name hereabouts for directing early vocal music.

The program contained an early motet by Bach, BWV 228, plus similar pieces by Telemann and some other North German composers older than Telemann or Bach: Buxtehude and two I wasn't familiar with, Franz Tunder and Johann Schop. Perhaps I ought to have known of Schop, since according to this he wrote the melody that Bach used for "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." All the pieces sounded lovely, even in German, though a couple had severely Lutheran lyrics. Flight mentioned that the Telemann, an early piece titled "Schaffe in mir, Gott, ein reines Herz" (create in me, God, a clean heart), doesn't sound much like the Telemann we normally hear. I don't know Telemann's choral music enough to tell, but the instrumental parts (the chorus was accompanied by six string players and a positive organ) sure sounded like Telemann to me. But the best work was Buxtehude's "Jesu, meines Lebens Leben" (Jesus, life of my life), with its creative use of the individual sections of the chorus.

Despite the group's name and this program, they don't always sing Baroque. Next season has four concerts, one German Baroque and one French Baroque, an Eastern European Christmas program, and a survey of British choral music "from Tallis to Tavener" which covers over 400 years. That one in particular interests me and I'll probably be back. Singing this good deserves patronage.