Budapest Festival Orchestra

“He shouldn’t be called ‘Bach’ [a stream], but an ocean”, said Ludwig van Beethoven in a play on the name of Johann Sebastian Bach. He also deemed him “The primal father of harmony”. Robert Schumann insisted that “we’re all bunglers compared to him”, while Max Reger struck a more philosophical note: “Bach is the beginning and end of all music”. Johannes Brahms recommended that we should all “study Bach because you’ll find everything there”. Mauricio Kagel opined that “composers might not believe in God, but they all believe in Bach”, and Richard Wagner naturally waxed lyrical: “If you want to grasp the marvellous individuality, power and significance of the German spirit, then look to the almost inexplicably mysterious phenomenon of the musical miracle that was Bach”. Claude Debussy advised us to “look to Bach, the loving God of music, to whom composers should address a prayer to save them from mediocrity”; and Mozart summed it all up by saying: “Bach is our father, we are his little boys”.

Even if not all of these handed-down quotations can be proven beyond any doubt to be authentic, the “who’s who” of the composing guild are nevertheless united in their veneration of Bach, vying to outdo each other with their superlatives, convinced that Bach offers us nothing less than what is true, divine and all-encompassing. In short: he was the greatest musical genius of all time. And thus Bach, alongside Mozart and Beethoven, remains one of the Holy Trinity of classical music to this day. To be sure, he’s inevitably on every “best-of” classical CD, and his music features large on the seasonal calendar (e.g. the Christmas Oratorio), in solo recitals (the Art of Fugue or his sonatas for violin or cello) and in church (his organ music). But in fact, his works are heard surprisingly seldom in the world’s great concert halls today. Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra are now bringing Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 4 to the Andermatt Concert Hall, offering our audience the opportunity to hear a prime example of Baroque counterpoint in the form of a festive suite of dances, cast in a brilliant, imposing style. Alongside Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, the programme also includes Iván Fischer’s own Dance Suite for Violin and Orchestra, dedicated to the memory of Bach. Here, instead of bourrée, gavotte or minuet, Fischer gives us ragtime, bossa nova and boogie-woogie – and yet echoes of Bach can still be heard, for as Fischer himself has said: “Bach was the inspirational resource for everybody”.