Customer Reviews

Bach Hits Back

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Swingle Singers have been around for a while, but I think they are just hitting their stride with this release. They do an incredible job of interpreting Bach, and not just the pieces written for voice! This is a fresh, charming and, sometimes amusing, interpretation of Bach's work. I particularly enjoyed "Air on a G string" and "Little Organ Fugue."

The Bach cd impressed me so much, I've just ordered their Mozart offering..."Acapella Amadeus."

Experience pleasant and enjoyable a capella realizations of Bach preludes, fugues, chorale and instrumental numbers. The Swingle Singers render some as vocal transcriptions of Bach's original, instrumental music, and others as jazz arrangements. Their hymn-like rendition of Ein Feiste Burg (A Mighty Fortress) bounces into a light and jazzy scatting of "Organ Fugue from Fantasia and Fugue." They perform 21 excerpts from Bach, none of which are too obtrusive for background music, yet all are excellent enough to listen to while doing nothing but enjoying the music.

Bach was a technical genius, and the Swingle Singers have the talent and creativity to bring his music alive, translating it into new idioms successfully. Worth every chord of five stars.

(If you'd like to discuss this review or CD, please click on the "about me" link above and drop me some email. Thanks!)

In the late 60's the Swingle Singers used to be a new advent. An inovative exercise on J.S.Bach. Now, revisited, there's a great pleasure to hear again the famous Badinerie and many other inspiring tunes like the Air on G string and the rarelly recorded Luther "Ein Feste Burg". The singers are much "Swingle" and the late harmonies comes alive. The arrangements are quite fresh although a bit diferent on the bass. The Bach fuges are masterly sung and at the end we find ourselfs "swinging and marking". A recording to be listened on and on, although we won't find on the booklet any word of the tracks sung on the CD.

I have sufficiently waxed lyrical about the Swingle Singers in my recent reviews to feel free to be not so enthusiastic with this "new" Bach album of theirs. "New", in the sense that the Swingle Singers started out, in their original, Paris-based layout around the group's founder Ward Swingle, with a chart-making Bach album, "Jazz Sébastien Bach" (published in the US under the title "Bach's Greatest Hits"), in 1963, followed in 1968 by a sequel, "Jazz Sébastien Bach le volume 2" / "Back to Bach"): the two were conveniently paired in the polygram CD reissue, see my review of Jazz Sebastian Bach. The original group disbanded in 1973 and Ward Swingle reformed a new Swingle band, now based in London. Swingle retired in 1984 but kept a position as a musical advisor and sometimes arranger. The personnel has changed many times since 1973, of course. The present disc was released by Virgin in 1994 but recorded in 1991. There is a minor mistery to that, by the way. Part of the program - circa 41 minutes of it - duplicates a previous CD, copyrighted 1990 and apparently self-produced: The Bach Album (note, if you look at the back cover photo, that there are two tracks 8). This Virgin disc completes that with 5 more tracks, adding 13 minutes (namely tracks 5, 11, 12, 19, 20). The discrepancy between the copyright year of the other CD and the recording date of this one leaves open the question whether the Virgin CD is actually a reissue of those recordings (but then why weren't the additional track also published in the earlier CD) or whether the Swingles re-recorded the complete program of the earlier disc with the complements, a year later. I'm not going to buy the other CD just to find out.

In the early, Paris years, the Swingles played with a Jazz drum-and-double-bass section. The new Swingles are a purely "a capella" group. Not that they dispense with the drums and double-bass: they now sing them, and, to make sure that you are aware of it, they've added a note: "The Swingle Singers produce all the sounds heard on this recording. No instruments are used". I don't blame them: if what I hear on tracks 4, 12, 13, 18 and 20 is a vocal imitation of brushed cymbals and drum, it is so expeertly done as to be mind-boggling, so indistinguishable as it is from the original thing. Hats off.

Typically Swingle is the arresting vocal beauty, the silkiness of the timbres, the virtuosic volubility and unique scatting techniques of the faster numbers (like the Badinerie from Suite No. 2, track 12, one of the Swingle's greatest hits), and the sensuously caressing soprano voice over silky scatting accompaniments in some of the slow numbers, like the "Air on a G string" (track 19) or the hauntingly beautiful Andante from the 2nd Violin Sonata, with its "panting" accompaniment (track 9; hard to explain in words, you must hear it).

Underlying all this is the sheer pleasure of hearing instrumental music returned to its vocal origin and essence. I've contended in my other reviews of the Swingle's discs that the fascination of the Swingle's arrangements and realizations derives from the fact that they elevated to the status of the highest of arts what we all do inadvertently, without even thinking about it, in a very rudimentary fashion, walking on the street, washing the dishes, ironing, vacuuming - and particularly under the shower: humming (or whistling) our favorite tunes. Moreover, I've also written that by so doing, the Swingles are in fact returning Bach's or Mozart's instrumental music to its very essence and origin, because what these and most other composers (presumably) do (or did) before committing their music to the music sheet is first to sing it for themselves, so that the instrument, even when its acoustical properties are radically different from the voice (like the plucked-string harpsichord or the struck-string piano), acts only as the imitator and emulator of the voice.

Why am I not so enthusiastic about this Bach disc then? For a number of reasons. First, what I've called in some other reviews the "old pal factor" is not so present here. Integral to the pleasure of the Swingle's arrangements (and of transcriptions in general) is hearing the old warhorses in a new timbral guise; it's like your wife showing up in a new sexy lingerie: new thrills to the old routine. But here you don't get so many of those "greatest hits" that are deeply ingrained in the psyche of every amateur of classical music. I guess the Swingles had left very few of Bach's greatest "hits" untapped in their albums from the 1960s, and in fact some of those they sing here were already in the earlier albums: Badinerie (Anyone For Mozart, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi?), Air on a G string (in the Jazz Sebastian Bach CD referenced above). Oviously there are just so many hits that even the greatest composer can sustain. So really here the unquestionablly great hits tackled for the first time by the Swingles are the first movement of the Brandeburg Concerto No. 3 (track 10) and the Chorale (not "Choral-Prelude" as Virgin wrongly calls it) from Cantata BWV 140 "Wachet auf" (track 4), and maybe the Choral-Prelude for organ BWV 731 (here only titled "Liebster Jesu, wir sing hier" - Beloved Jesus, We Are Here, track 6). If you are into singing Christmas Carols, "In Dulce Jubilo" (tracks 7 and 8, the two tracks 8 of the 1990 CD) might also sound familiar, and if you are familiar with Alban Berg's Violin Concerto, then you will immediately recognize the concluding "Es ist genug" (track 21).

Virgin by the way is horrendously unhelpful, when not downright misleading in its labelling of the various pieces, giving none of the BWV numbers and sometimes even wrong titles, and annotators/singers/producers tenor Jonathan Rathbone and bass Ben Parry don't always solve the questions (and the track listing you download from Gracenote is also often mistaken); the original and "incomplete" 1990 CD did give those BWV numbers though, so it appears that what the Swingle sing on track 8 is the last verse of Bach's 4-part a capella chorale, not in the original language (mixing German and Latin) but in the (sometimes criticized) translation of Pearsall (keeping the Latin phrases of the original, and substituting English to the German). But track 7 is not at all Bach's organ Choral-Prelude on the famous medieval tune - in fact Bach wrote two, BWV 729 and 751, although the latter is apparently dubious, if the excellent Wikipedia entry is to be trusted: there the Swingles start with a simplied version of the soprano part of the 4-part Chorale... sung by the tenor (!), seguing at 0:49 into a typical and lovely Swingle arrangement of none of these two Chorale-preludes, but of the BWV 608 organ Chorale (not -prelude) on the same theme, with soprano (taking upper voice) and tenor (taking bass voice in canon) still singing the words (first verse again) and with bass dum-dumming a double-bass. If you are puzzled with the notion of a "Three Part Invention" (track 14) - you should be: Bach's keyboard Inventions (every piano beginner has toiled on numero uno, with no sense of style nor ear for polyphony) are two-part, and the companion three-part pieces are the Sinfonias; what the Swingles sing here is Sinfonia No. 11. "Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier" (track 6) is the Choral-Prelude for organ BWV 731. The opening "Ein' feste Burg" is not a movement from Bach's Cantata BWV 80, but the four-part a cappella chorale BWV 302. Track 4 is not "Sleepers awake: Chorale prelude", but the Chorale (not prelude) "Zion hört die Wächter singen" (Zion hears the watchmen singing) from from Cantata BWV 140 "Wachet Auf, ruft uns die Stimme" (and rather than "Sleepers awake", it should be translated by "Wake Up, The Voice Calls to Us"), but it is sung here in an uncredited English tranlsation, and the ensuing "Wachet auf: Chorale" (track 5) is indeed the cantata's concluding Chorale - now sung in the original German. "Sheeps may safely graze" (track 11) is the Arie from the "Hunt Cantata" BWV 208, sung in the original German, "Schafe können sicher weiden" and the closing track "Es ist genug" (track 21), the concluding chorale from cantata BWV 60 "O Ewigkeit du Donnerwort" (O Eternity, Thou Word of Thunder).

Another reason of my somewhat lukewarm reception is that the Swingles have here chosen to treat the excerpts from the vocal and choral pieces - the cantatas, chorales nd carol - as precisely that: vocal and choral pieces, e.g. with the words sung, rather than "instrumentalizing" them. In some cases they just sing Bach's original 4- or 5-part chorus, as in the opening chorale "Ein' feste Burg", the concluding Chorale from "Wachet auf" (where they simply do withouth the colla voce instruments), the song "Bist du bei mir" from Anna Magdalena's Notebook (the attribution to Bach is doubtful) or the last verse of "In Dulci Jubilo" which is again straight Bach. I feel that this misses the point entirely of what makes the art of the Swingle Singers so unique: precisely, vocalizing instrumental music, returning it, as I said, to its vocal essence and origin. Here, they don't sound so unique, but just like any good a capella ensemble. The first Choral from "Wachet auf" (track 4), and "Sheep may safely graze" (track 11) are fortunately more elaborate and "swingling" that that, but the two exceptions to that "singing" rule are "Et Resurrexit" from the Mass in B-minor (track 15) and "Blute nur" from the St Matthew Passion (track 17), both entirely "instrumentalized", and it comes as no surprise that they are both very effective.

Daring and quite provocative to finish a disc with "es ist genug" (it is enough). In fact I wish there had been more (even with the added tracks the disc's 53 minutes aren't so generous), and more in the unique Swingle scatting style rather than anonymously "a capella". As it is, this disc probably isn't the best introduction to the art of the Swingles. Their 1991 Mozart album is more enjoyable in that respect (A Cappella Amadeus - A Mozart Celebration), or the two Bach LPs and miscellaneous Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi and Handel from the 1960s (see links above). But don't get me wrong: their "Bach Hits Back" is still very enjoyable.