REVIEW ESSAY

The 7-part film narrative progresses by unlocking Bach’s Music then moves through Bach’s travels, relationships, scores, controversies with his choirs and clergy, focusing then on Bach in his middle years and later years. The 7-part film is a permissive and static evaluation of theology, passion, death, architecture, sound and ultimately richness in terms of performance, composition, instrument, skill, heritage, and pedigree. These topics would have benefitted from a progressive approach with regard to Bach and Expression. As you move through the sections there is discourse covering aspects of Bach and atmosphere; the limitations of the instruments available, both then and now; discussion around definitions of personal expression where the organist is both participant and listener; historically informed performance and its benefits and limitations; presenting the Chorale Prelude as a common currency in the time; liturgical language and its affect on the compositional process; investigating perceptions of Bach’s Organ music as a sermon in sound and craft. All this supported throughout by practical musicianship score analysis with detailed explanations and examples.

By part 3 we are introduced to Blanken who shows us some of Bach’s original scores. From this point forward these observations are interspersed throughout the documentary. This offers the viewer the real personal Bach: manuscripts worn around the edges due to heavy use, changes in articulations, the way today in practice musicians write markings into their personal music copies. These scores provide heartfelt observations of the father-like role Johann Christoph Bach (Brother) played in collecting Bach’s scores, akin to a parent putting a child’s painting onto the refrigerator. Blanken offers examples of ‘the tale a document can tell from merely its physical existence irrespective of the content of the parchment’. It was good to have this element of 'Bach the man’.